Top 25 David Milch Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn’t.

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.

The truth is I try to show up each day available to do the work that God or whatever it is that’s making, you know, the solar system work wants me to do. And I expect when he wants me to stop, I’ll be the first to find out.

The kind of flinching from any form of art or experience that PETA seems to advocate is ultimately life-hating.

When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.

I have several different masks that I wear.

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.

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.

Humility has to do with trying to be a vessel of purposes you’re content to understand as not your own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church.

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

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

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

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

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.