TV Writers Quotes

It's understandable why TV hasn't been diverse because a lot of TV writers are white dudes from Harvard. And white dudes from Harvard aren't going to immediately want to write about trans issues. They're not immediately going to want to write about a Filipino family.

Jimmy McGovern - I love his writing, and I'm a big fan of him and Alan Clarke.

When you're working on a television series, you only get a very short off-season. The scheduling of TV is relentless.

In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.

The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.

I've been watching more American TV because of all the great TV series that have come out in the last five to 10 years. I'm a 'Sopranos' fan, I'm a 'Wire' fan, I'm a 'Mad Men' fan. I'm a 'Deadwood' fan. It makes me optimistic for the future of storytelling on TV that producers are willing to take that kind of jump.

TV is the place that writers want to be. When you don't have a very strong indie market going on, talented writers want to have their voice heard, so they'll go somewhere else, and everyone goes to TV because their voices are heard.

In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer will turn in a script and never be heard from again.

I have always been a HUGE Star Wars fan since I was like 5 years old. Most of us in the writers room at Family Guy were big nerds growing up and could recite almost any scene from Star Wars.

The one good thing about television is the money; you can make a lot more money than in newspapers.

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

There are terrific TV shows now. This is a golden age for TV humor, I think. There's an actual market there. Of course, I have no idea how you'd break in, but there must be a way. They have all these shows and they need jokes and somebody is writing them.

You can't really compare any TV show to a show written by Aaron Sorkin.

TV is the place that writers want to be.

Paddy Chayefksy was writing and it was a time where everybody was happy to be there [on TV].

The directors you want to work with are in the television world.

Most of the writers in TV are from L.A. or New York, and those are places where people are cynical and snarky. And they fly from L.A. to New York in an airplane over this vast, expansive land where people aren't snarky; they're a lot more like the 'Parks and Rec' characters.

You look at shows on cable, and there's a lot of smart writing out there.

There are a lot of good writers in TV!

I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.

TV is a writer's medium.

Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.

There were plenty of times some writers would make some kind of stupid joke to each other and then it was on TV that night or that week.

I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.

TV writers live life of well-paid, specialty prostitutes. We have a very special skill set and we occupy one of the higher floors in the bordello that is writing. We do a very particular job for a very select clientele.