“It’s one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There’s not …

“You know, sometimes people in West Baltimore say to me, about Season 2, “We know you tried to take our show white, but it didn’t work—then you came back to us.” And I have to …

“At the end of thirteen episodes, the reward for the viewer – who has been lured all this way by a well constructed police show – is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. …

“The grand theme here is nothing less than a national existentialism: It is a police story set amid the dysfunction and indifference of an urban department – one that has failed to come to terms …

“There’s a cynical bent to the political implications of the story. But as far as the story itself and the characters, I love these characters. I love the quote-end-quote bad guys, I love the quote-end-quote …

“Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worthless. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. …

“If people didn’t realise after this many seasons of The Wire that they were watching a Greek tragedy, writ across a modern American city… And if they thought that there were going to be redemptions …

“I think [The Wire] will hold up, and I think it’ll hold up as a unified 60 episodes. But I could be wrong. Is anything really a masterpiece? Shit’s never finished; it’s just abandoned, I …

“One of the themes of The Wire really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything… Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to …

“It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent …