“Hitchcock was one of the few people in Hollywood who had a brand. Every movie he made was an Alfred Hitchcock movie, couldn't have been anyone else.”
“Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'”
“I said it's a cold universe and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there. We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?”
“You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.”
“I'm the number-one fan of gangster movies.”
“I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself.”
“When we were doing 'The Sopranos', I used to love that about it. There were rules, Mafia codes you had to go by, but the code is ridiculous. It's a code among sociopaths.”
“I think for anyone who follows the 'artistic life,' a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You're probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have.”
“I think people are intolerant of artists.”
“People have said that I said I hate television. I never did say that. What I said was that I hated a lot of stuff that was on television. It's nothing about the medium itself.”