Terence Winter

“TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs.”

“If you're truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don't finish sentences. They don't say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people's ideas.”

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

“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.”

“With an interesting character, there's always something to say.”

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

“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 was always interested in the 1920s and the gangster world, in general.”

“Does 'Jersey Shore' make me sad for humanity that this is what's passing for entertainment? Well, this is a business, and if that's what millions of people want to watch, I can't fault someone for producing it.”

“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.”

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

“I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.”

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

“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.'”

“We may live like saints, but when it comes to our fantasy life, everybody's got a little larceny in their soul.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed.”

“My favorite thing to write is people under pressure in high-stakes circumstances.”