Jim Rash Quotes

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

There are writers' rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone's process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.

To make the script, you need ideas, and for me a lot of times, a final script is made up of many fragments of ideas that came at different times.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.

Part of what I love about producing is to get to work with writers.

On 'The Deuce,' the writers' room gets like group therapy.

If you bring in actors right when you're breaking story, it has a 'too many cooks in the kitchen' effect.

I am very happy to be working with so many talented directors and writers, who are penning scripts that are interesting for me.

All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.

I'm proud of 'Sinister' because Scott and Cargill did a great job on the movie, and I set up a framework for them to make what they wanted to make. They gave me the idea, and I figured out how to get it out into the world.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

I've written plenty of scripts that sucked.

To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them.

One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.