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.

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.

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.

Cancer don't respect nothing.

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 had a prior deal in place to do a miniseries for HBO, so I'm not done with TV. But I basically want to stay in movies.