Miguel Sapochnik Quotes

I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

Pay-per-views bring conclusion to storylines and what has been going on from television. It is important to give viewers satisfactory pay off over storylines and that is why pay-per-views are important.

The critiques I received from my father's community didn't actually have to do with any of the things I'd been afraid of - spiritual or cultural aspects - they were more annoyed that I'd killed off this character or those characters hadn't hooked up or I'd done an open ending and it didn't give them a sense of closure that they were expecting.

Each book needs a good beginning and a good ending. People get pissed off when you don't close things off properly at the end.

If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to that third chapter, and the third chapter is what justifies what's come before.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was.

I have great respect for daytime drama. I love the branding. I love the style. What can I say? I love good soap!

I am not sure how much Dudley will feature just because of the grand scale of the film and the fact that there are so many stories and characters to tie up. I haven't seen the film yet but I think it will be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but it was nice just to round it off and give it some closure.

I very much use Bill Willingham's approach on 'Fables,' which is that rather than having an end point to a series, I have an end point for the various story lines.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

Genre stuff is really hard to pull off, as any fans of it know.

I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.

I love 'Boardwalk Empire,' but there were moments where I thought it didn't have the constant through-line that 'Breaking Bad' did and 'Better Call Saul' does.

Personally, I think it would have been really nice, if 'Lost' had just one season.

When you're doing a movie, it's finite - you have a trajectory of where your character's going, and you follow that. Then the storybook closes.