David Milch Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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I am kind of an undecipherable commodity to a lot of people, including myself.
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When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.
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I am an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand.
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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.
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There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All I do is work and be with my family.
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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.
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Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day.
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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.
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Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life.
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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.
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Even having all the time in the world, it's better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It's ultimately the richest experience.
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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.
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What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.