I know that telling the story, there are certain events I want to skip, and certain events I want to hit. The time passing allows for - if you're really following people's lives, and this isn't a cartoon - someone gets pregnant, a child will be born, etc. You really don't want to be locked into "Every episode is a month later." The show is very intense to make. There's always going to be some downtime between seasons, and to me, it really helps to come back to the next season in the reality of that world, and have almost as much time passed in their lives as has passed in yours.

I have this amazing team that I trust. I completely go with their decisions on things. I don't have to go in and micromanage everything. And I think the other thing is, you start to sort of... I wouldn't say relax, because I've never relaxed. But I've tried to have more confidence in the things I like, or the things other people like. That's really the big thing in this job, to second-guess yourself all the time.

I was never really that worried about being a member of the Sopranos crew. I think it looks kind of fun to not have to work, to not have to take crap from anybody. And then there's the reality check in there, which is that you do have to work, you do have to take crap from people, and you can fail, and all these other things.

My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

I don't want to pretend like I'm clairvoyant or anything, but I had a tremendous sense of malaise about our political future. This is right around the millennium, right around 1999, when I wrote it. The Sopranos certainly reflected that; when I saw that on the air, I was like "Oh my God, I'm not alone." But it doesn't seem that the culture really caught up with that. George W. Bush won two elections... I'm not even trying to say this from a political standpoint. I think there is a resonance to the kind of glory of that period, and the foreboding of what happened.

You can do a lot with a commercial break - you can change days, you can suggest the passage of time. So sometimes that's a great thing artistically, to know that's going to be there. Obviously you'd always prefer that people see it straight through, and you don't want them to be taken out of it by advertising, but that's the reality of what's paying the bills here.