DAVID MILCH

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.

Ego suppression can be an act of ostentation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.