Quotes from Kurt Sutter

Actors always feel more comfortable when there's an actor directing, in terms of vocabulary and breaking down a scene.

I am a pile of reworked flaws weaved into a semi-functioning man.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

You have to be driven by something greater than you, where you don't surrender, and you commit to something like that.

I always have a sense of where I want to end each season, emotionally and relationship wise and with the theme, and I'm always able to hit that.

I like to take fictitious characters and circumstances and wedge them into a real world.

If there's any secret to my success, it's that I just hire people who are smarter and more talented than I am.

By the time I was a teenager, I weighed 400 pounds.

All the people who follow me on Twitter know my sense of humor. I sometimes forget the blogosphere will give it more weight than I intended.

I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began.

I don't read a lot of fiction, but one of my favorite authors is William Kennedy; his books, to me, almost read like historical dramas because the mythologies are so detailed as he wove fiction with the factual history of Albany.

The rumor is not true: I am allowed in the state of Texas.

I'm not, like, a gregarious guy. I don't walk into a room and want to engage people. I'm just not wired that way. One on one, I'm fine.

I've learned in most areas of my life, to bounce heated choices off other people. Co-workers, my agent, my wife, a sponsor, etc. A majority of the time, that keeps me on the right side of things.

I'm a guy desperately in need of buffers. I have big feelings, big reactions, big emotions. All the things that serve me as an artist, but challenge me as a socially-responsible human being.

Never in the history of 'The Shield' was the word 'LAPD' ever mentioned. We would mention districts, like Wilshire and Hollenbeck and Marina, but Farmington was a fictitious district, and we never actually uttered the word 'LAPD.' So that was sort of the deal we made with them.

Me personally, I'm a guy who it took a long time to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I relate to a lot of that finding oneself a little later in the game, or being thrown a curve later in the game.

'Sons' was about working class white guys. And even though I didn't grow up in a motorcycle club, I grew up in a working-class, white-guy neighborhood.

I'm a guy who has problems with moderation. All or nothing. Binge and purge. Kill or be killed. Gray is not a color I wear well. I should be dead. I know that. I should not be successful. I know that too. My daily existence is a toss of the coin - one side, fear, the other side, gratitude.

I don't think or write from big ideals.

The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.

I wish I had tougher skin, but I don't.

I love being able to stay real to the world.

I can be arrogant, I can be insufferable.