Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think we're all trying our hardest, and a lot of times we do bad things and need to do more good things. We need to be more caring, more forgiving, more loving.
When I write, I try to turn my Internet off so I can't procrastinate through the Internet, but then I just get deeply involved in whatever I have just on my computer.
I'm very interested in telling darker stories that maybe you are not used to seeing in animation. Especially because in animation you don't see those kind of stories.
I think some actors are very smart and have the tools. They know how to disconnect themselves from the characters, but I think for a lot of them, it's very difficult.
I think we're so often, as writers, afraid of writing something that is less than perfect, and that fear paralyzes us. I'm a big fan of writing less than perfect things.
It is so easy now to never get bored because we have our phones with us all the time and we are always looking at stuff. I think when we get bored we are the most creative.
Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.
I'd like to think that 'Bojack,' in some ways, pushes the edges of what some people think an adult animated show can be. That was an intention of mine while making the show.
The nature of being an artist in any field, but specifically in comedy, is that almost as soon as you finish something you hate it, and it feels dated, and not your best work.
I have a lot of affection for those old shows. You can put on an episode of 'Full House' or 'Family Matters' or 'Growing Pains' now and I'll watch it. And I'll totally enjoy it.
A lot of Christmas episodes feel like stories in quotation marks. Uh, a homeless guy comes to live with them and they all learn a lesson. That didn't come from an organic place.
I think there's something very valid about having feelings that you can't articulate. I don't think you should shut those feelings out, but I also want to be able to communicate them.
For a long time in my adolescence, comedy was the only tool I had for communication and dealing with the world and dealing with people - I didn't know any other lens in which to do it.
Why do we want to win an award? Yes, my grandmother would be very proud, but I think it's also so people can hear, 'Oh, this show won an award. I guess it's good. I should watch it now.'
Humor was a big part of my childhood. My family was full of comedians. We'd sit around the dinner table and try to one-up each other. It sometimes ended in tears, but usually in laughter.
You're going to get different kinds of animation for different kinds of audiences. Traditionally, adult animation has been for the young male audience. There's no reason why that should be.
I named him Todd Chavez after a guy I went to middle school with, whose last name was Chavez and who I always liked. He had a good energy, and something about his spirit felt Todd-appropriate.
When you surround yourself with white people, you continue to hire white people, and when you make an effort to hire people of color, that does bring in different stories and different people.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was staying with a friend of a friend of a friend up in the Hollywood Hills. I was in this tiny little closest paying $400 a month in this beautiful house.
I've been in rooms where the creator has sold a show and then felt like the network didn't buy the show they wanted. They bought a show they thought they could craft into the show they wanted.
Any show that kind of relish the damage of its main character without really investigating what that damage does, where it's from or what it means, is a show I think needs to be taken down a peg.
I think you need to think of yourself as a flawed human being with aspirations for goodness and never start to think, 'Oh, I am a good guy. These other people are bad guys. They're dumb, I am smart.'
For me as an audience member, it makes the characters more relatable and interesting if they're evolving and changing - it makes them feel more real in a way. But not every cartoon is trying to be real.
I think that, as a show creator, you have to be very careful about what messages you're putting out into the world. That is a not always popular thing to suggest, because it feels very Tipper Gore-y, perhaps.
What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.
'Lost in Translation' movie says something interesting about the alienation of being a stranger in a strange land, but also of being a celebrity. That kind of feeling of not being in the same strata as everyone else.
I always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.
I think as soon as we start thinking of ourselves as good people, that's when we start letting ourselves off the hook which is bad. I think we should always be trying to be better but that doesn't mean we want to be good.
In 'Bojack,' at least at first, we had to couch some of the sadder or weirder or introspective stuff we were doing in the costume of a typical adult animated comedy. With 'Undone,' it felt like we'd outgrown that expectation.
I don't know, I don't know how to do anything. I'm just like, doing impressions of what I've seen other people do, and hoping no one knows that I'm actually just a little monster in a human suit making my arms go up and down.
I've written six seasons of a TV show with great help from an incredible staff of writers and other collaborators, but I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I've kind of freed myself of the expectation that I ever will.
If you are stuck on a problem, go for a walk and think about something else for a little bit. Going for a walk is very helpful for a writer because if you are staring at a blank page of a computer screen there is all this pressure.
Our better angels get clouded and we're more selfish than we should be, more anxious or neurotic or desperate or self-sabotaging. Crueler, even. But I do think there's hope for everyone... I think redemption is possible for anybody.
That's all life is, I guess. Just a bunch of riffs. Look at me: I'm wearing a tie. Why am I wearing a tie? It's because I saw an adult wear a tie and I thought, Oh, that's what people do. We're all just trying to be what an adult is.
I would like to see BoJack find some sort of peace. I don't know if happiness is the right word; I don't know if he deserves that... But I would like to think even a soul as lost as BoJack can somehow crawl his way toward redemption.
It's really cool to get these guests on the show BoJack Horseman: not just actors, but, "Can I get Jonathan Lethem on my weird talking horse cartoon show to talk about how growing up in Brooklyn, he always dreamed of being a ringtone?"
I love to go on road trips. That's one thing I love about being in L.A. and having a car. In New York, you can get around on the subway but you can't really go anywhere. But there's a danger in believing that where you are defines you.
A lot of the hesitancy to talk about the industry in real, concrete terms is not because of people being afraid of biting the hand that feeds them, and more about the fear that people in the middle of the country will not be interested.
One thing I think about a lot is that one of my favorite pieces of narrative art as a child was 'Calvin and Hobbes.' I really saw myself in the character of Calvin. I was rambunctious, I didn't always follow the rules, I had a wild imagination.
The beauty of Netflix is that you can figure out a good part of the season before you get started. You're never in the hole of, "Oh, we've already released the first four episodes, and now we gotta make the finale, and we've already promised this."
It's something I've seen a lot of: these tortured geniuses, or self-proclaimed tortured geniuses, who kind of take their damage out on others. I think being a showrunner, you have a lot of unchecked power and I think that can be a very dangerous thing.
In a certain way, sometimes it does feel like we say goodbye to a character, and we don't want to bring them back unless we have a good reason. We left the door open if we wanted to use him more. I always think it's better to leave the audience wanting more.
You need to know that you cannot control your feelings, and you cannot control your feelings about your feelings, but, as best as you can, intellectually understand that your feelings are valid and they're okay and don't try to stifle them or feel shame about them.
When we started on 'BoJack,' it was understood that the Netflix model was to give shows time to find an audience, and to build that audience, and I remember being told, 'We expect the biggest day 'BoJack' Season 1 is going to have is when we launch 'BoJack' Season 2.'
BoJack especially is a very dialogue based show. A lot of the comedy comes from conversations, and a lot of story comes from misunderstandings and people trying to connect with each other, and there was a really interesting challenge trying to write a script with no dialogue.
My mom's last name is Bob. My dad's last name is Waksberg. Every time I try to get a ticket at will call, they say last name. And I say, Bob-Waksberg. And I see them looking under W. I go, no, Bob-Waksberg. And they go, no, last name. And I go no, my last name is Bob-Waksberg.
My general feeling about award shows that I've been to in the past was always that when you win, it's a great time. What a joy. You're celebrating there. And when you lose, the whole thing feels very stupid and why does anyone care about any of this. This is boring. I want to go home.
This whole idea of too much TV, I think is really gross. Because I feel like it's mostly white men who are saying it. And it's like, 'Yeah, man, there's too much TV for you, but by nature of there being so much TV, there are other voices being represented.' Isn't that a wonderful thing?
With Bojack we are seeing him on this journey. I think we're hoping for him to find a way to be more gracious and kind and positive and better to people in his life and better to himself, but I don't know if I necessarily frame it as he was a bad person and he will become a good person.
I was doing this really wacky sketch comedy but at the same time writing these dark, cerebral plays about characters coming to grips with their loneliness and heartbreak. My dream job has always been a way to combine the two. I would say 'BoJack Horseman' is the culmination of all of that.