David Milch

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to the race track, and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that.

A person could look at me through ninety-five per cent of my experience and know that I had no shot. Because I was so unreliable. The only thing you could rely on me for was to betray you.

The kind of flinching from any form of art or experience that PETA seems to advocate is ultimately life-hating.

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

I am an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand.

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

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'm not saying I'm wealthy. The best thing that ever happened to me in that context was turning everything over to Rita. And the business people. I am on a leash. That's not the end of the world.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

Commercials were once TV's version of the church. Which is to say, you couldn't offend the sponsor; therefore, certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter.

Someone asked me, 'How long do you intend to do 'Deadwood'?' And part of my sociopathology, I say, 'Well, when does my contract run out?' And I realize my contract ran out at the end of four seasons.

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.