Top 61 Quotes & Sayings by David Milch

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day.

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

I'm no rose. I have been around a while, and you never know when something is going to be the last thing you do.

What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.

Showbiz and churches are the same thing. You never saw 'The Wizard of Oz?'

Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life.

Every man's entitled to hope.

I am kind of an undecipherable commodity to a lot of people, including myself.

The truth is I try to show up each day available to do the work that God or whatever it is that's making, you know, the solar system work wants me to do. And I expect when he wants me to stop, I'll be the first to find out.

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.

The paradox is that money never meant anything to me. And it still doesn't, except now as an occasion for regret in that there are things that I want to make sure my family is protected when I pass.

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.

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.

I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all.

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.

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.

It's kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

It may be, for one reason or another, if I'm not able to work, that would be a cause for distress. But I'm still pitching. Thank God, I'm still in possession of my gift. And I have the love of my family.

What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.

There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

I've been beaten. I know what that's like. They say, 'Who has been a nail can learn to be a hammer.' So I know what it is to beat people.

With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.

The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church.

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 remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

Your fundamental responsibility is to stay true to the deepest nature and intention of the materials.

My relationship with the track was, I would say, at least fractionally as complicated as my relationship with my old man. So it kept me coming back.

That's the definition of love, that going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly.

So much of what we do is shame-based, and when you're teaching, you have the opportunity to answer to the best parts of your nature, so I'm always grateful for that chance.

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 have several different masks that I wear.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

Ego suppression can be an act of ostentation.

You want to harbor your resources and try not to make a mistake.

What constitutes - where are we when we sleep? What is our sense of reality at that moment? It's, you know, science now suggests to us that what has been perceived as matter for a long time is, in fact, energy.

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.

The predicate of modern medicine is, 'We invalidate your humanity, but we give you immortality, so you have to shut up and listen to us.'

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.

In any operation, what you have to do is to persuade the patient to grant access to the patient's energy. The purest form of that is when you're trying to help a woman through labor: when you're saying, 'Push, push!' and you're rhythmically with the woman.

When someone is good at what he does but is a nonconformist, there is a temptation in horse racing, like in all kinds of other areas of human endeavor, to dismiss him for his nonconformity rather than to recognize him for his excellence.

I had the erroneous conviction that all of history tended toward my birth and would diminish into chaos or inconsequence after I was gone. When you realize that's not so, the proper humility is to defer.

A syndicate is a group that has gotten together to pool their money so they can cover more contingencies. If I come to track with, say, $200, and I join a syndicate of 20 people, each of whom can bet $200, we can spread our bets, and that gives us a better chance of winning.

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

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

I think it's disrespectful to go onto a set without some clear idea of what your intentions are, because then you're hanging the director out to dry.

Most races are claiming races. For the lower-caliber horses, it's a way the track has of forcing people to run their horses at approximately the price at which they would not mind having the horse bought.

If you have a horse that can beat horses worth $20,000, typically you enter it in a $20,000 claiming race. Now there might be people who feel their horse is worth $20,000, and they say, 'I wouldn't mind seeing the horse get beat.' So they'll enter it for $40,000 so the horse looks like it's performed badly.

Time will tell whether I am a wing nut or a megalomaniac. The difference between a cult and faith is time.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

As a writer, I don't have a sense of my own position. I try to disappear and not to think of myself at all when I'm working.

All I do is work and be with my family.

My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.

And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of matter, he might use some drugged-out surfers.

Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you're not writing.

The biggest lie is the idea that we are entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing, a conclusion, of something which never concludes. In that regard, this is the lie I'm telling myself so I don't set fire to anything.

My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.'