Quotes from David Chase

Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up.

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.

I've said this a million times. But I've always wanted to do movies.

Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this.

Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else.

I have a liberal arts English degree, so I was brought up thinking that's what it was all about, and I had to learn that sometimes, or often times, art just is. It's not attempting at anything. It's not providing answers. I had to grow up a little bit before I got to that.

It doesn't matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.

Hope comes in many forms.

The thing about movies now is in a way what it always was: The screen is huge and now the sound systems are too. And you never get that with TV. Even with a home system, it's never the same.

Your father tells you a story when you're a kid, or your mother or your uncle or whoever it is. You sit there with your mouth open, and your mind goes to all these places they're telling you about that you've never seen, and you're agape. You just can't believe that things can happen like that - but it's just so direct.

There's something very dreamlike about film, and I will always be very fascinated by that, and I'm always tempted to go in that direction.

Don't get too comfortable. We are here for a certain period of time, and how much of your life are you gonna choose to spend with distractions? How do you make your choices? What is important?

I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself.

I'm the number-one fan of gangster movies.

The Sopranos was the first show about the life of the writer. I never made any secret about the fact that it was about my mother.

People have said that I said I hate television. I never did say that. What I said was that I hated a lot of stuff that was on television. It's nothing about the medium itself.

People get so tired of the '60s.

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

I would imagine that the more time you spend talking to another person, the more you're going to lie to them. So if you spend a lot of time with your relations, you're probably lying a lot to them.

Hitchcock was one of the few people in Hollywood who had a brand. Every movie he made was an Alfred Hitchcock movie, couldn't have been anyone else.

When I was doing 'The Sopranos,' I liked putting music together with the film; that was my favorite part of it.

When we were doing 'The Sopranos', I used to love that about it. There were rules, Mafia codes you had to go by, but the code is ridiculous. It's a code among sociopaths.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

I think people are intolerant of artists.