Nathan Fillion Quotes

'Grey's Anatomy,' that was a great show to be part of, but they work really long hours. They were all just really tired. Just worn out.

'Battlestar' was 22 episodes - 9 to 10 months a year - and we were exhausted. You finish shooting, and the last thing you want to do is go back to work. You want those 3 months off because you're tired - it's a grueling shooting schedule.

'Law & Order' is a six-month shoot. Everything has to be crammed in. I had so much fun, but it wasn't a holiday. We had seriously long days, and we'd finish at 8 P.M. and start again at 7 A.M. We were doing six-day weeks, which sometimes tripped onto the seventh. But I loved it all.

Michael Price is the showrunner so nobody works harder than him.

Michael Landon was the biggest influence. As a child, I watched him write, direct, star, and produce a TV show every week. He showed me what was possible.

I have so much respect for television actors and directors. We're on set doing 16-hour days, and that's just what we do.

But when you're a working actor - and that's what you keep saying in your head, how blessed you are to have a job - and you are working with heavyweights, working with the best guys in TV, it's pretty cool. Exhausting, but cool.

Looking back now on our workload, I just shake my head at our pace. 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' was my first series, so I didn't know anything about that when I started. I just assumed it was normal to make 26 episodes a year on a seven-day shooting schedule.

We shoot 'Hustle' for 12 to 16 weeks, so that's how long I'm here each year. I've always loved London. I lived here for three years back in the Seventies, when I did a TV series, 'The Protectors,' for Lew Grade.

I respect the hell out of everyone who does a network show. That is a marathon. It's so many episodes, and it can be a meat grinder. Anyone making a network show, and on top of that making a very good network show, that's an insane feat of Herculean endurance and fortitude.

'Spooks' was unique. It took up such a lot of your life - I think we did 10 episodes for the first few seasons. That's six months of your life.

If I've done anything, I've brought passion to television.

[Television] is a great medium for writers, because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write it, you shoot it; it's on TV.

We've been playing a lot with television. We have some shows set up and then some new shows that are about to be set up. That's gonna be kind of a fun thing for us as producers.

Nobody realizes that I work 18 hours-a-day for a solid month to make that TV hour look like it's never been rehearsed!

It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.

When you do a television show in the States, you get the pilot, and then it's the great unknown. That's the way it is. It's this great leap of faith. It's the Russian roulette of art.

When you do television, there's more to do, and when you do new television, there's a lot more to do, especially when you don't have partner. I miss not having that person.

Basically my personality, and my talent, and my lyrics are so outstanding that what listeners can tell is that I put so much hard work into what I'm doing because it comes through my music. So I feel that my music for one will get my point across. I write from my heart and my spirit... You know what I'm sayin'? Some people don't know their place, they're just like "Oh I rap because I'm tryin' to get this or that, and I'm doin' this because I want to get money.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle, and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hard-working, and intent men -- their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others.

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

If you're doing an indie and you have time, sometimes you can do take after take after take, but if you're working in television on that filming schedule, you don't always have the time to do that. You learn very quickly, I think, how essential it is to come in with the strongest choice that you have.

I can say that. I have a television show.

The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming.