Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.
You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.
With a sitcom, everyday you do a run through, and people are judging you, and the scripts are being changed nightly, nightly, nightly.
I read Stephen King as a junior high schooler. My father introduced me to Stephen King far too young, which I'm very grateful for now.
I have found, unfortunately, that if I take on too many projects at one time, there is a higher probability of those projects sucking.
What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.
I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.
You can save the city, but having the city be in jeopardy is one thing and having the people you care about be in jeopardy is another.
I remember the dark days when, thanks to 1966's 'Batman' with Adam West, comics were considered the ugly stepchild of popular culture.
I'm a big believer in 'Trojan horses' - There are certain themes that are more palatable when wrapped in something fun or distracting.
My dad had made a documentary called 'The Dream Factory' about MGM, and my whole life, I just wanted to be inside it. And there I was.
The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.
It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.
I like shows where the female characters are as funny as the male characters, not just commenting on how funny the male characters are.
Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.
When I make fun of you, I strike just the right note. When you make fun of me, you're an incredibly ungrateful asshole and you know why.
When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
We had all been feeling this, about the Buffy/Riley relationship. It never had the fire that Buffy/Angel did. It wasn't really meant to.
Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.
A sure-fire way to know you're crazy is if more than one person has told you you'd be great on a reality show - and you agree with them.
We spend a good part of our lives trying desperately to convince ourselves as well as everybody else that we know more than we really do.
Whenever the boss has 'fun' activities, there's got to be a parable or a lesson. Employees feel like they're supposed to be taking notes.
Every season, we spend what really should be our hiatus, and what really should be me relaxing on a beach, planning out the whole season.
I stop and look at traffic accidents. I won't hang around, but when I hear something is terrible, as bad as it is, I've gotta look at it.
There are so many women who I deal with, on a daily basis, that I don't feel like I've ever been stymied or struggled because I'm a woman.
For every man that ever walked the Earth, except maybe the sociopaths, when it comes to talking to pretty girls... it's just stark terror.
I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.
We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.
My wife could give a rip about comic books, but she loves 'Arrow,' and she loves 'The Flash,' and she likes them because of the characters.
I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.
One of the main pitfalls of any theoretically "niche" show is that you spend too much time on the "niche" and not enough time on the "show."
One of the main pitfalls of any theoretically 'niche' show is that you spend too much time on the 'niche' and not enough time on the 'show.'
Of course, I'm not saying that news interviews can't be adversarial. Sometimes, you have to be nasty Columbo or we'd never get to the truth.
I'm not somebody who goes online after every episode airs because that would be, for me, getting too much feedback and too much information.
I thought it would be an enormous amount of fun to make a movie that heads out into space, which is something that we had never done before.
For 'Breaking Bad,' our offices were in the ugliest building in Burbank, California. Which, if you know Burbank, is really saying something.
Don't forget that you are the product of a culture that went stark raving mad about ten thousand years ago. Adjust your thinking accordingly.
It's frightening that skepticism has to be a movement, because you're just arguing that reality is reality. What a waste of energy, in a way.
If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.
I think 'Green Lantern' has the potential to be a very highly regarded superhero movie. We're approaching it with such respect and such care.
I joked recently that I thought 30 seconds a day for three years would be the best way to enjoy it, and I'm going to stand by that statement.
I go up to my office and sit down in front of my computer and turn on the internet and then I don't work - that's the end of work for the day.
There's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.
You know, you throw rocks in the lake and scientists will tell you you're raising the level of the lake, but all you get to see is the ripple.
People have nannies and big cars, and they want to go to Maui for Christmas. When there are those kind of stakes involved, people get ruthless.
Josh Duhamel is somebody you can't take your eyes off of, and same with T.R. Knight. It's a car that you want to run up to 100 mph, right away.
Our problem is that when you lose the touchstone, which is humanity, then when you have something like humans dying, it needs to feel profound.
Essentially, there's no scientific evidence whatsoever that could ever be presented to me that would wipe out my fundamental spiritual beliefs.
Mankind's expectations have to be greater than ourselves and that the further out there we go, the more we find out that it's about you and me.
I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.