Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm actually a big fan of having all the different types of voices on television. I think it gives people a nice little buffet that they can just pick and choose how they want to get their news and entertainment, I guess.
A lot of my family on both sides have worked in education and nursing, and my grandmother was a nurse; my sister is a nurse, and her - my other sister's daughter is going into nursing. There's a lot of that in the family.
What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark - not too dark - fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page thats really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.
The truth is I try to show up each day available to do the work that God or whatever it is that's making, you know, the solar system work wants me to do. And I expect when he wants me to stop, I'll be the first to find out.
What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark - not too dark - fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that's really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.
The thing that's worked for me is having as much of a connection to the material as possible. And sometimes the material requires a more straightforward approach, and sometimes it requires a little more silliness, you know?
The biggest lie is the idea that we are entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing, a conclusion, of something which never concludes. In that regard, this is the lie I'm telling myself so I don't set fire to anything.
We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.
I try to impart this when people say they want to be a writer and they want to go into show biz. I say, "Well, have you taken any courses? You can't just have a passion for it; you have to prepare yourself for a life of it."
My joke is that three black people watch 'The Daily Show' at any given time. So if I'm watching it, that counts, and there's only two left. It's a silly joke, but you know, different types of comedy reach different cultures.
Endings are the hardest part. I find there's a great relief that at the end of every episode, every hour of TV you produce, while you want a proper and satisfying ending, it doesn't have to end The Story, in capital letters.
TIVO executives stand up and say, 'Well, we're not getting rid of commercials, but we are letting them fast forward, because people like commercials, and if they see one that they like they stop and watch it.' I mean, please.
The morning, when I need to have opinions and answers across the board very quickly, is a constant fight between ease and inspiration, what will make our lives easier versus what will make us excited because we were ambitious.
'The Simpsons' money got bigger and bigger. When I left 'The Simpsons', no one thought that this thing was going to still be around. It's the cumulative effect. It's like, 'Oh my God, 25 years later, and it's still coming in.'
Finding yourself on a show that's appreciated by its intended audience is a very rare and lucky thing, so when you win the lottery like that, you don't want to rush its conclusion; you want to keep it going as long as you can.
All I can say is that with 'The Golden Compass,' I didn't get to make the movie I had planned to make. When I look at the film, at the casting and certain scenes, I'm very happy. As for the final product, I can't vouch for that.
I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.
Hey, maybe instead of going to college, you should drop out and I could quit my job and we can form an all-girl band with Lane, you know, like Bananarama. We could call it Tangerinarama or Banana-fana-fo-fana-rama...or something.
Advertising is a conscienceless industry, populated by cowards and idiots, that warps and drains everyone. It eggs on the worst in all of us. If I could eliminate either advertising or nuclear weapons, I would choose advertising.
As far as how important the real-life resonance of the stories is, I think it must play at least a small role in the show's success, because it gives the show this sense of suspense from the fact that it seems at least plausible.
We all put on faces, as Walter White does. We put on faces when we meet our friends, when we meet new people, when we present ourselves in interviews. We try to be who the people we meet want us to be, or who we want to truly be.
There is a business here first of all, as a company and secondly, the ability to make films that audiences want to see and wouldn't get the opportunity to see. It's exciting. That's where our whole thought process originated from.
My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.
It's craziness to see yourself as damaged goods, so I was the goofy kid who'd stop a strange adult and say, 'Do you know how to get to Palm Avenue?' They'd say no, and I'd say, 'You go two blocks and turn right. You can't miss it.'
According to the fortune-cookie logic most people live by, the best things in life are free. That's crap. I have a gold-plated robot that scratches the exact part of my back where my hands can't reach, and it certainly wasn't free.
I'm excited about my own network, BounceTV. It's the first African-American-owned broadcast network. It's myself, my partner Rob Hardy, and some other African-American businessmen, including Andrew Young and Martin Luther King III.
The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
The idea that you could stitch together every detail episode to episode and preserve continuity for the length of a season and tell a story while using no time cuts, no flashbacks, nothing but pure real time just seemed too difficult.
When someone is good at what he does but is a nonconformist, there is a temptation in horse racing, like in all kinds of other areas of human endeavor, to dismiss him for his nonconformity rather than to recognize him for his excellence.
When people have no interest in a subject, it's very hard to get them to laugh about it. If I had to write ten jokes about potholders, I don't think I could do it. But I could write ten jokes about Catholicism in the next twenty minutes.
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
I don't have that kind of Southern experience, of the fire-and-brimstone preacher type of thing. Certainly not in my comedy. I come more from the guilt-ridden, neurotic type of [ - ] I have more in common with the Jewish brand of comedy.
I have no idea how it got so big. I was just trying to find something to do while I was living in Boulder, Colorado, which isn't really a funny town. There are a lot of smart people there, but comedy isn't at the forefront of their minds.
I think I would love a shot at remaking 'The Philadelphia Story,' as daunting as it is. I still think it's fantastic. I love the '30s comedies because they're allowed to be both comic and elegant, and the women are so complicated in them.
Whatever it takes to get you where you need to be, there's nothing wrong with the method acting or having to growl and bang your head in a corner and get into the moment and work yourself into a lather - if that's what it takes, so be it.
I really believe you have to make television with the belief that you're going to continue on. If you hedge bets and you catch yourself being measured, I usually find that's a bad sign. Maybe you know something that you don't want to know.
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
I'd rather go after the people who are the guardians or what we're doing - the news people and the politicians and that sort of thing. I always feel like those should be my targets, not really entertainers. That's just my personal opinion.
'Sex and The City' was made to correct the myth that if you were single at a certain age, you were a leper. Its four characters are heroes to a lot of women; they run around New York, or Gotham - but they have fancy shoes instead of capes.
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
There are tragedies that happen all the time in America, but there are certain types of tragedies that kind of pull us together and make us pause and give us a chance to reflect about where we are, where we're going, and that sort of thing.
When you are dealing with approximately two-plus hours every few years to do a story, you don't have the luxury of having excessive screen time to explore, in detail and in-depth, lots of other subsidiary or ancillary supporting characters.
I am not an actor. Yes, every so often I appear on talk shows to promote something I've written, and I enjoy doing so because I have a lot of stories to tell, and I like making audiences laugh. But that's not acting. That's just me being me.
My dad, who was creative director in the '60s, always wore black jeans with black desert boots; he thought he was cool. He told me to buy a pair as well. I didn't like black, so I got the sand color, and I've been wearing them since college.
A good team, like a good show, comes into being when the separate individuals working together create, in essence, another separate higher entity - the team - the show - which is better than any of those individuals can ever be on their own.
I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.
Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn't have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
We had a segment called Tampon Tuesdays that I was very proud of; that was hilarious because there are a lot of women's issues out there that a lot of people don't know about because they're not women, and they don't have to go through them.