Quotes from Terence Winter

Nothing about Tony Soprano's life was glamorous. He was never somebody I wanted to be. His life was terrible.

When Prohibition was first enacted in 1920, most people stockpiled alcohol, thinking they'd have enough to last them for years. By 1923, that was starting to run out, so your average person started to rely more and more on criminals.

To get to work with my idol, Martin Scorsese, has just been lovely - the highlight of my career.

I'm not exaggerating when I say 'Taxi Driver' was the movie that stopped me in my tracks. That was the first time it got me thinking about movies.

There's a certain type of person drawn to the gangster world, and they're generally young men who were predisposed to violence and risk-taking, who like to make a lot of money quickly and wear flashy clothes.

People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away.

First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.

I think people, whether they realize they're doing it or not, seek out distractions to take their minds off what they know is bad behavior.

During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.

I think I sing a few songs, and I sing them well, and one of them is the mob genre, you know, as a writer.

There's nothing funnier for me than taking two characters and throwing them into a pressure cooker and letting them turn on each other. Especially if they already tend to be loud, aggressive, alpha types. That's sort of everything from 'The Honeymooners' to 'Goodfellas' to 'The Sopranos.'

The first rule of show business is get off the stage while people still want more.

It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.

Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why.

I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.

One of the nicest things I ever read about our show was that a critic felt 'Boardwalk Empire' could be the beginning of the blur between television and cinema, because the production values are so high and the storytelling is so compelling.

I look at the feature films that come out, and by and large, 85 percent of them are things I wouldn't in a million years sit down and watch. The more interesting storytelling is happening on television by a long shot.

I think that 'Vinyl''s faster-paced. I think 'Boardwalk' was much more luxurious in its storytelling.

As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.