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But, I like the challenge of, "How can we stretch this out? Where can we go with it?" It's an open road, especially at Netflix. You can take it anywhere you want.
I think that of most leaders in religion as power brokers. They give orders, in a sense, to an audience every week, and that's where the definition of God starts.
When I saw 'Blade Runner,' my understanding was that 'Blade Runner' and 'Alien' were sequels to each other - or they were related. They were set in the same world.
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
The most frustrating thing to me is when I tell people I work on 'Friday Night Lights,' they'll say, 'Oh, I hear that's a really good show.' They never watched it.
What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.
They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.
If there's a theme to where I'm at in my life, it's that 'warts and all' is actually my superpower. Just like you, I'm messed up and I'm capable. I'm this and that.
One of the good things about consulting is that you leave the writers' room for a couple of days, things progress, you come back, and you might have a fresher take.
Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.
The East Coast, and certainly Boston, has a provincial quality to it that makes it harder to bust out and move up. Try to be too different and they'll pull you down.
Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.
I think it makes people frustrated when they have to live their actual lives commercial free and they can't just magically wind up at the part with the happy ending.
Too many people will die needlessly if we go back to letting people buy junk insurance or insurance that doesn't help people with diseases related to mental illness.
We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.
I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.
You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand! You say no! You have the guts to do what’s right, even when everyone else just runs away.
While some of us may know than others about certain things, it is the thinnest slice of all that is, or could be known. In that sense, we are all profoundly ignorant.
As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.
The dream of doing what I do started with watching movies by Mr. Spielberg, like 'Close Encounters,' 'Poltergeist,' and 'E.T.' That was the beginning of my obsession.
Somehow, married or single, we'd rather anesthetize ourselves with love substitutes than go for the real thing, because let's face it: The real thing is pretty scary.
Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.
Yes, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on there, but it still comes down to those seven people. What are they going to do? How are they going to deal with everything?
Father Ted' would be impossible to remake it in America. The whole situation of being Irish and being a priest in Ireland is so different than anything else in America.
I get contacted daily by people in America saying is there any legal way to download 'The IT Crowd', but the whole mechanism is too rigid to allow for things like that.
Part of the job involves thinking about things and eliminating them. You spend a lot of time coming up with ideas that are terrible and hating them and hating yourself.
I love Larry David's take on things in 'Seinfeld', which is that you shouldn't try to help people because it'll always put you into new situations which are unpleasant.
I am pretty interested in trying to write and produce an animated film at some point, but that's a job that takes several years, minimum, to get an animated movie going.
We're no good at holidays, the wife and I. We just don't have the knack. We had one good one, early on, but that was a fluke. Everything since then has been a nightmare.
I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.
From my own internal fanboy perspective, there's nothing that I hate more than seeing a three minute trailer for a movie where I feel like it's shown me the entire movie.
I watch a lot of TV, but I find that recently it's largely oddball stuff. Scripted stuff sometimes feels like homework, like I'm scoping out the competition or something.
I think that we, as human beings, always need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasp and I think it's very important that we don't become complacent or stagnant.
The term 'Consulting Producer' is extraordinarily nebulous in TV, and it really means something different depending on the show and the specific circumstances negotiated.
I think comic books have come an incredibly far way, and I want to make sure we don't take a step back. I certainly don't want my name on a movie that would take it back.
It all starts with a very solid, well-executed script, where the story is very clear and everybody is rowing in the same direction. That's always good; that's a constant.
If there was a sense of - a bigger sense of responsibility in the various leadership positions in America, things would be not as grotesquely overly done as they are now.
A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
It was enormously challenging because you want that all-American girl, but you also want the cool WASP, privileged white girl. Usually, women in that package aren't funny.
Gravity. It keeps you rooted to the ground. In space, there's not any gravity. You just kind of leave your feet and go floating around. Is that what being in love is like?
Don't play games with me! You just killed someone I like, that is not a safe place to stand! I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the Universe. Look me up.
I'm the straight-talking woman in your life who is going to be really honest with you, but come from a place of love. I'm not talking down to you; I do this from my heart.
Dating is a social brain teaser, as it requires constantly changing ratios of intimacy and distance, an erotic mental cha-cha choreographed by chemistry, insight, and fear.
Without really trying to, I've become a sort of jailhouse lawyer of relationships - someone who's had to do so much work on her own case that I can now help you with yours.
I was struck by - Einstein's a fascinating figure who didn't have any instruments that he used, he didn't use telescopes, he used his mind to try to understand the universe.
For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.
Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.
For the most part you are dealing with jealousy, you are dealing with love, you're dealing with hatred, you are dealing with revenge and all of these sort of classic things.
River Song: Right, I have questions. But number one is this: what in the name of sanity have you got on your head? The Doctor: It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.
I created a tone for network television that they hadn't really been seen before. And I have to admit that was really more of an accident. I was just writing the way I write.