Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's good to be unexpected with it.
I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan.
People, they don't know how to bend; they just break.
The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.
Let's not forget how beautiful simply washing dishes can be.
There's only one note you ever get in broadcast and that's clarity.
You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.
What makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points.
The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.
Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president.
When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.
I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.
The anthology format is completely normal to me. That's just how TV works in my experience.
There's the craft of acting, and then there's a quality. There's a quality that someone has.
There's still nothing like a book to really make you feel like you've disappeared into a world.
The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America.
I think this idea of fighting the enemy within is sort of more interesting than fighting an external enemy.
If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.
Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world.
There are things we can control and the things we can't control. I can't control how people react to the work I do.
In a book you can really talk about ideas and themes and characters in a deeper way than you can even on the screen.
The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That's not the case at FX.
As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.
My feeling has always been if you entertain people, they give you permission to do more on a thematic or character level.
I am a salesman, I am an executive, I look at budgets, I think about power politics, but then I am also a creative person.
I guess I still have this motto: 'What else can I get away with?' And unpredictability in film - that's the hardest thing there is.
Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don't think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.
I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.
One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.
Some roads you shouldn't go down. Because maps used to say there were dragons here. Now they don't. But that don't mean the dragons aren't there.
I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over.
I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.
If I have to write on an airplane or get up early to write or write late, you just gotta sit down. When you have the time, you have to be able to do it.
I drove around New York when we did the upfronts and when we premiered 'Fargo,' and they crocheted a sweater for a double-decker bus and drove it around.
Greatness and fiasco is the same. You're reaching for something just out of your grasp, and if you get it, it's great, and if you don't, it's a disaster.
Anytime you want to create something different, you have to convince people that it's O.K. 'We'll be O.K. It's going to work out. It's going to be great.'
America is a huge country, filled with great tracts of open land. If you're not careful, you can get lost in it - lost emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
I'm not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, 'I don't get it,' it's worth looking at.
My feeling is there's a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.
I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion.
It used to be for writers that that six seasons and a movie thing, that's the holy grail as writers - your series goes eight, 10 seasons, you're set for life.
My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.
The prospect of being a father made me ask myself a question. How do you know what kind of adult your child will turn out to be? And how much can you control that?
The 'X-Men' stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don't fit into normal society and are ostracised; it's a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation.
I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that's a really frightening idea.
I think the age of the modern media campaign has created a new icon, the celebrity-in-chief. Political elections have become wars fought by candidates with opposing values.
There is the moral spectrum in 'Fargo,' and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.
The great thing about an anthology is that each year is its own 10-hour movie, and the only requirement is that it's the best 10-hour movie that I can make out of the story.
I don't think we have to suffer personally to make great art. If you're prepared and organized, and you know what you're looking for, you can make great art and then go home.