TV Writing Quotes

One of my favorites is 'Parks and Recreation.' Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer's room, which I love.

I learned how to write TV by writing 'Grey's Anatomy.'

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

'Deadwood' proved that viewers are smarter in terms of grasping intricate dialogue than they had been given credit for.

Chuck Lorre and I had been talking about doing one of his shows for a while. I said I'd like to do 'The Big Bang Theory,' because I think it's the best written, most intelligent show on television.

My dream of dreams is to write Broadway musicals. All of this Twitter and TV writing is just a day job.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television - by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame - has always called my name. And after seeing 'True Detective,' can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?

I got into television, and I'm a television guy, so I've never really had a movie career.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.

I don't want to carry a network show. I don't want to give up 10 months, working 17 hours a day, up at five in the morning.

I'd love to write a book and dabble in TV a little more - but only if it's right. I'm not going to go out there and beg anyone for a job.

People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

[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.

I wrote for 'King of the Hill' for three seasons.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Cheers was one of the first shows where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters.

The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.

Typically on a TV series, the writers on a show are writing for their life almost every episode. When someone sits down to write a Netflix show, they know there's going to be a 13th hour.