David Chase

“I think for anyone who follows the 'artistic life,' a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You're probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have.”

“I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.”

“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.”

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

“People get so tired of the '60s.”

“I have a huge editor in my head who's always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.”

“Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'”

“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.”

“'The Sopranos' is filled with really retrograde humor. Bathroom humor, falls, stupid puns, bad jokes - infantile, adolescent stuff, but it makes me laugh.”

“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.”

“I had a prior deal in place to do a miniseries for HBO, so I'm not done with TV. But I basically want to stay in movies.”

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

“I said it's a cold universe and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there. We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?”

“I think storytelling is all about children. We human beings love to hear stories being told - and it first happens when you're a kid.”

“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.”

“I was so besotted with '8½' that, when it was on TV, I used to take pictures with my 35-mm. camera of the frames of the film. That was the first time I'd ever really seen Italians on screen.”

“I think people are intolerant of artists.”

“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.”

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

“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.”