David Chase

Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up. ”

The Sopranos' is filled with really retrograde humor. Bathroom humor, falls, stupid puns, bad jokes - infantile, adolescent stuff, but it makes me laugh. ”

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff. ”

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 would imagine that the more time you spend talking to another person, the more you're going to lie to them. So if you spend a lot of time with your relations, you're probably lying a lot to them. ”

The thing about movies now is in a way what it always was: The screen is huge and now the sound systems are too. And you never get that with TV. Even with a home system, it's never the same. ”

I was so besotted with '8½' that, when it was on TV, I used to take pictures with my 35-mm. camera of the frames of the film. That was the first time I'd ever really seen Italians on screen. ”

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Laurel and Hardy' with my cousins all the time. I still think they're extremely funny and so surreal. ”

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.' ”

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. ”