Terence Winter Quotes
3 min readMay 28, 2023
- If you lose your house and your life savings to a broker, you’d probably throw them in the same category as the worst gangsters in history. Everybody’s definition of carnage and evil is different.
- If I hear an interesting turn of phrase on TV, I’ll repeat it back — I just like to roll it around on my tongue. The same goes for dialog: I’ll either speak it aloud or whisper it. I definitely sit in front of my computer and mutter. People have mentioned it.
- I’ve had ideas for romantic comedies, but it would be a much more darkly comic version than what usually sells tickets.
- 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.
- 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.
- I’m not really gangsta. Not at all. I just write about them. It’s fun to pretend, at least on paper. But in real life, not so much.
- There’s a certain type of person drawn to the gangster world, and they’re generally young men who were predisposed to violence and risk-taking, who like to make a lot of money quickly and wear flashy clothes.
- In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer will turn in a script and never be heard from again.
- Nothing about Tony Soprano’s life was glamorous. He was never somebody I wanted to be. His life was terrible.
- With an interesting character, there’s always something to say.
- I think I sing a few songs, and I sing them well, and one of them is the mob genre, you know, as a writer.
- I’m not interested in someone’s credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.
- Very often at the end of ‘The Sopranos’ you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it.
- First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.
- 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’m not exaggerating when I say ‘Taxi Driver’ was the movie that stopped me in my tracks. That was the first time it got me thinking about movies.
- It’s challenging, in a way, but if you depict anyone with all the colors of human emotion and show those moments — with their families, with their children — the worst of us have elements of real humanity.
- 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.
- I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed.
- I started with the book ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.
