Quotes from David Milch

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

Your fundamental responsibility is to stay true to the deepest nature and intention of the materials.

A person could look at me through ninety-five per cent of my experience and know that I had no shot. Because I was so unreliable. The only thing you could rely on me for was to betray you.

I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all.

I think it's disrespectful to go onto a set without some clear idea of what your intentions are, because then you're hanging the director out to dry.

It may be, for one reason or another, if I'm not able to work, that would be a cause for distress. But I'm still pitching. Thank God, I'm still in possession of my gift. And I have the love of my family.

To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be, as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process.

The kind of flinching from any form of art or experience that PETA seems to advocate is ultimately life-hating.

Commercials were once TV's version of the church. Which is to say, you couldn't offend the sponsor; therefore, certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter.

The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church.

Humility has to do with trying to be a vessel of purposes you're content to understand as not your own.