Terence Winter

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.

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.

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

Any distraction tends to get in the way of being an effective gangster.

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.

J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s.

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.

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.

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.

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.