David Milch

“It's kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As a writer, I don't have a sense of my own position. I try to disappear and not to think of myself at all when I'm working.”

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

“Every man's entitled to hope.”

“Even having all the time in the world, it's better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It's ultimately the richest experience.”

“In any operation, what you have to do is to persuade the patient to grant access to the patient's energy. The purest form of that is when you're trying to help a woman through labor: when you're saying, 'Push, push!' and you're rhythmically with the woman.”

“You want to harbor your resources and try not to make a mistake.”

“There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow.”

“My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.”

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

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

“The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.”

“I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.”

“That's the definition of love, that going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly.”