Bill Burr Quotes

As much as I love scores of wonderful sites across the web, most of them are driven by the daily grind of the display/pageview hamster wheel. They create 20, 30, 40 'content snacks' a day, and I miss far more than I consume.

Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.

What the world does not need is another script or television writer.

In a media landscape that has grown in unimaginable ways, there are more projects that have come along now than ever. While the number of projects has grown, many players are vying for that audience.

I just think it's quite remarkable that everyone says they want to add more commentary to their news pages. In some ways, I think, 'Well, how is that even possible?' It seems sometimes that that's all that there is.

The more we can personalise, the more the market can fragment, because of all the availability that streaming presents. Things become old sooner. That's terrifying.

When I started in television, it was brand new. It was the miracle over in the corner of your room. Now the audience has seen every story line. People have heard every joke. They can predict the plot almost before a show starts. That's a hard, sophisticated audience to reach.

There's so much to watch, I can't even keep up.

There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency. Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value.

I could sit here in the tribunes and watch Michelle Kwan skate for hours.

You have to have all these elements of a feature but with a third of the length. And also the development process - there are so many more steps in getting notes from the studio, getting notes from the network.

I always want to watch something I've done, so that I know what I didn't do well.

To me, YouTube isn't just, 'Watch my videos!' It's, 'Let's have a conversation and get involved in each other's lives.' I want to make [my fans] feel like they have a reason to have a YouTube account because they can comment and have a voice.

One of the things I've learned - before I would go on a show, I was like, "Oh God, I hate that show" or "That show is gonna get canceled." But now after being full-time on a show, you see how difficult it is and how much work goes into it and how so many decisions are based on finances or people's schedules or talent or location issues. It's a miracle that anything gets made.

If I tape an 11-hour day, guess which parts end up on air. Not the bits when I'm pleasant, but the parts when I'm obnoxious.

The Daily Show was an incredible training ground for that kind of thing. It was all about discipline and generating material constantly.

With media, it's never bad-to-good. It's always just moving from different to different. Faster, more stuff, but there's always good, more good, and more bad.

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.

I think you have to write what you want to watch.

Every generation has a changing of the guard in media. We do the same stuff that everybody else does, but we just do it differently. We do our content online differently. We do our magazines differently. We do our TV differently. We never had anyone tell us how to do magazines, so we just developed it in a different way.

The other great thing about it, that seems to be the case in streaming, is that a lot more scripts are written before you start. Because they are planning on allowing it all up at one time, you have four or five scripts to read and an outline of where it's going to go. The writers aren't chasing their tails as much. You're able to see the beginning, middle and end of a storyline, and that is rare. Streaming allows that, in a way that network TV doesn't.

Distinguish between the work and the job title. When I was leaving school in the early 1970s, many people wanted to be journalists, carrying out investigative reporting for print newspapers. Print newspapers may not exist in twenty years. But good thinking and good writing about issues that need to be reported and investigated will always be needed; but where this happens, what it is called, and who pays for it may be quite different than could have been envisioned by the great journalists of the past.

When you're just writing, you can do anything with it. But with TV, you've gotta work within certain budget constraints, so you've got to pick and choose your battles.

The days of television as we knew it growing up are over. You have a bigger, wider world audience on the Internet, larger than any American television series. People don't watch television in the same context as before. Nowadays they watch their television on the Internet at their convenience. That's the whole wave, and it's now - not the future.