Sopranos Quotes

You know my feelings: every day is a gift. It's just, does it have to be socks?

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

I was a boy soprano. I had a natural kind of voice and then trained it after my voice changed.

I've been watching more American TV because of all the great TV series that have come out in the last five to 10 years. I'm a 'Sopranos' fan, I'm a 'Wire' fan, I'm a 'Mad Men' fan. I'm a 'Deadwood' fan. It makes me optimistic for the future of storytelling on TV that producers are willing to take that kind of jump.

Being on 'The Sopranos' definitely prepared me for the militant secrecy of 'Mad Men.'

I'm a different writer now. You don't sit in a room with Sopranos creator David Chase and writer Terence Winter for four years and not learn something. And just watching the way the show was done, and watching the way that David encouraged the imagination.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

I can spot a musical type. I can tell by looking at a woman whether she is a contralto or a soprano.

Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.

The cello is a hero because of its register - its tenor voice. It is a masculine instrument, whereas the violin is feminine because of its soprano pitch. When the cello enters in the Dvorak Concerto, it is like a great orator.

I'm a huge fan of The Sopranos, and suddenly, you find yourself going one-to-one with this guy who you've been watching for years, watching every flicker in his eye and every detail on his face.

It was just as shocking for me to sing opera in a falsetto soprano in Germany.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly.

In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.

I'm a lyric soprano. I can try to step outside that and do different kind of singing, but it's not something I can sustain over the long haul, and what is good for your voice is good for your career.

And like a soprano shattering glass, Juliet heard something snap deep inside. It was the sound of her heart breaking.

We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP -- an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'

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 music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.

Not to toot our own horn, but when 'The Sopranos' was on, it was as good as any movie that was coming out in the theater. I think that goes for a lot of shows today.

When we were doing 'The Sopranos', I used to love that about it. There were rules, Mafia codes you had to go by, but the code is ridiculous. It's a code among sociopaths.

I find I have to be the sad clown: laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I hardly ever belted; I was a soprano and a comedienne and intended on doing mostly soprano legit roles but my first equity show, to my surprise, was Blues in The Night at The Cleveland Playhouse.

It's a crazy soprano, and singing as a man as a woman. But for many years, I was on the road in Chicago as Mary Sunshine, so I can do that. I didn't think there was any way I was going to get it - it was so far out of my comfort-zone.

I was researching some of the modern-day figures that The Sopranos were moulded on. So many iconic Sopranos moments. James Gandolfini and Edie Falco had an incredible scene together in the kitchen of that house that looked like it was about to explode. That was an iconic series that changed the way we did television. It is also an extremely realistic portrayal of the mafia. Much more so than The Godfather. The Godfather, one of the greatest films ever, but let's face it, a romanticized version of the mob.

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.

This is gonna sound stupid, but I saw at one point that our mothers are ... bus drivers. No, they are the bus. See, they're the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way. They continue on their journey. And the problem is that we keep tryin' to get back on the bus, instead of just lettin' it go.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.

'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.

I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world.

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

I wanted to play a good guy after doing this lunatic on The Sopranos for two years. And then they did the sequel to Bad Boys, where I get to play the barking captain again.

My role is almost a sight-gag. I have to be a woman to sing the lyrics "I am a man" to have it be a joke. I start the lyric in a male-register and a whole coloratura up into a soprano. And other points in the show... like the guy who likes to be treated like a baby and wear a diaper!

The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with the seven-layer dip...And maybe if the kid apologizes for interrupting my poker game." Maybe if I kick you in your soft spot, I thought. And make you sing Soprano for a week.

I was on a show called '12 Miles of Bad Road' with Lily Tomlin - it was an incredible HBO show. We shot 6 episodes, previewed it before the finale of 'The Sopranos;' it was written up as a 'Great New Show on HBO,' and then the whole thing was canned. Gone. Disappeared. That's when I realized anything can happen in this business.

Nobody inspired me more than Julie Andrews, who is a classically trained soprano herself.

The tendency of modern American women to exclaim 'Hiiiiiiiiiiii!' in soprano octaves and hug each other upon sight can be disconcerting to those unfamiliar with it.

I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep.

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.

I've been in so many funeral scenes from The Sopranos, and I think I've even been in one on Sons of Anarchy. Those scenes, as a human being, are the most tedious scenes, of all time. You're waiting, all day, in the blistering hot heat. So, I didn't need to be there.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

Over the years, TV has gotten so much better, especially with the advent of cable. The bar has been raised. I think HBO really set the standard with The Sopranos, and then on mainstream TV, shows like Lost broke amazing ground.

Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else.

Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.