All the Pieces Matter Quotes

“David Simon: The things that reform systems are trauma. Great trauma. Nobody gives up status quo without being pushed to the wall. I believe that politically. The great reformations of society are the result of undue excess and undue cruelty. The reason you have collective bargaining in America and it became powerful is that works were pushed to the starvation point. The reason that you have the civil rights we do is that people were hanging from trees. That notion of the system [being] self-reforming without incredible outside pressure and without first [bringing] about incredible trauma through inhumanity or indifference - I find that to be really dubious. I’m arguing for reform. It’s not like I can say this and say we should throw up our hands and can’t try. Every day, you gotta get up. I’m saying this with the clarity of: there’s no choice but to try. (68)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“All of a sudden, The Wire became that show where there was a hierarchy. If you say you like The Wire, that means you like reading books. That means you give a fuck about the human race.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Andre Royo: I think that's the real beauty that you find in every human being that scares you. When a human being stops trying, when we don't give a fuck, when we say, "Ah, fuck it. I don't care," once that aspect comes into the human psyche, humanity is lost. You got to want to try. Whether you know you're pushing that rock up a hill or you're going to bang your head against a brick wall, the idea to not try cannot seep into our society. We got to try. (275)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“George Pelecanos: This is what I think we did best: we showed people how things work, why things are the way they are. ...if you came up the way I did, you've been hearing all your life, "Why can't these kids just pull themselves up by their bootstraps to get out of the ghetto?" Like it's easy. I think in that season [three/four], we showed America why it's very difficult for them to do that, because of everything they're up against. That's really what I'm proud of, is that we articulated on film the mechanics of why things are the way they are. (257)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Seith Mann: The thing about that scene [where the girl student slices the other girl's face] that really struck me, was Dukie and the fan. After this girl does this horrific thing, Dukie is reaching out with this fan in this sweet way. It was profound to me, seeing Dukie and the way he goes in the story. ... Seeing someone in the midst of all that chaos, for him to zero in on this girl and try to extend this gesture of kindness, of sweetness that can't really be articulated, was poetic. Even in the midst of all this madness, there's this sweet soul trying to touch somebody else and knowing the rest of the reason and how he gets lost on his way, to a certain extent, is why I think that season is so powerful. Just having an inherently good heart does not help you when you're in certain circumstances. That's tragic. (228)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Tristan Mack Wilds: One of the conversations from Ed that I remember the absolute most, it was during my audition. We've had deep, intellectual conversations and we've had ones where he'll say a few words that will stick with you for the rest of your life. This is one of the joints that stick with you for the rest of your life. I was in the middle of auditions, and i twas kind of the last audition for the character of Michael ... Ed pulled me out. He's kind of sitting there, kind of just thinking. He said, 'Less is more. Remember that for the rest of your life. ... The less you do, the more everybody will feel it. Because we're so prone to seeing so much. With acting, with life, whatever. W'ere so prone to seeing so much more more. But when there's less, the mystery behind it, it leaves people guessing. It feels so much more. (227)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Opportunity is what these kids lack," Burns said. "The path is the corner or the stoop. We're talking about these kids here on the corner. They don't have advocates ... Corner kids, there's nobody rooting for them. You have to change that world, and where you have to start is ages zero to three. That's the most formative years of your life, and you're not even in charge of it. You got to go back and you got to create institutions that give that child the dignity, the self-respect, the love that he or she needs to go out into the world. (221-222)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Richard Price: One of my favorite things that David (Simon) did - one of the sentimental tropes - is that if you take a kid on the street corner, and this kid is dealing and he's holding together the business, he's got the inventory, he's got sales, he's got police pressure, he's got higher-ups pressure. If this kid can keep numbers in his head and make money, they say, "Well, if this was a white kid and you put him in Wharton and he came out, he'd be running the world." What David did, and it's very sentimental to say that, but what David did, he took Stringer Bell - and of course you'd see Stringer Bell in a corporate setting - he took him to the cleaners, everything but his underwear robbed. I loved that, because everybody wants to feel good and say, "If you took this young kid," but no. It might be true if the kid was born in another body, in another world, but he wasn't. There's a ceiling. There's a very low ceiling. (207)”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Ed Burns: You can rescue a child, but you can't rescue the children, and the the difference. Opportunity is a much better word than hope. If a child sees the opportunity and you can direct the child toward the opportunity, then the kid's okay. Hope is like a dream.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Lance Reddick: I was alone with David, and we just got to talking. I asked him something. I remember him saying organizations can't be reformed, but people can. I rememeber being struck by it when he said it, because I knew that I had never thought of it that way, and I knew that there was something profound in the insight. Then, over time, particularly when I watched the show, I realized how we see both on the criminal side and on the police side, you see people struggling to live up to the codes of the institutions that they're a part of and seeing how it chips away at their humanity.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“David Simon: Everybody has an expectation that much of American television is about redemption and about affirmation. We were trying to make a show that was basically an argument of dissent. It was political dissent. It was saying our systems are not functioning. Our policies are incorrect. We're not going to find a way out of this unless we stand back and take stock and turn one hundred eighty degrees from what we've been doing, particularly in regard to the drug war and inequality that we were depicting.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All The Pieces Matter

“The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all,”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Everyone was bright and everyone had a point of view and everyone had a dimension that was a human quality no matter how steeped in chaos and mire that they were.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“There seemed to be a pattern that people who started to pursue goodness were often the people who got offed. Stringer was starting to see a way to not kill people and to run a business, and he gets killed. D’Angelo wanted out; he got killed. So, the really horrible people tend to survive.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“The audience is a child. If you ask the audience what they want, they’ll want dessert. They’ll say they want ice cream. They’ll want cake. You ask them what they want the next minute, they’ll say more ice cream, more cake. You show them that they like something else. “You like fried chicken? Here, taste my fried chicken.” Then the next ten things they order will be the fried chicken. “You like Omar?” “Yeah, I love Omar. Give me more of Omar.” No, I want to tell you a story, and the characters are going to do what they’re supposed to do in the story, and that’s the job of the writer. That’s the writer’s job. That’s the storyteller’s job. You don’t write for anybody but the story, for yourself and for your idea of what the story is. The moment you start thinking about the audience and the audience’s expectation, you’re lost. You’re just lost. So, you’ve got to just put it out of your mind and tell the story that you think you’re there to tell.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“There’s that expression, David always uses it: ‘I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE WIRE

“Kids don't vote.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Vincent Peranio (Production Designer): I like the lighting. In so many vacant houses where we were filming, we're filming in a natural light or making it look like natural light because it didn't have electricity. Actually, some of the lighting to me was almost like a painting from the past, like from the seventeenth century, a Rembrandt look about it, the darkness of the house and the sunlight searing through the boarded-up windows. I think the show was bleak and beautiful in the way that looking at ruins in a ruined civilisation are.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“Kima Greggs: I've always been a bit of the antiestablishment side of things. I had very radical opinions about capitalism and the corporate structure.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire