Schur Quotes

#1. You can't just sit around in leopard-print slippers and drink champagne all day and think everything's gonna work out somehow.

Michael Schur

#2. As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'

Michael Schur

#3. I hate this phrase, but it's a "can do" attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.

Michael Schur

#4. I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.

Michael Schur

#5. I am of the opinion that there is more high-quality television being produced than at any time in the history of television.

Michael Schur

#6. And personally I will say that Amy Poehler deserves about a thousand trophies and so one is a good start, and I'm hoping this is the first of a thousand. That's my personal hope.

Michael Schur

#7. Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.

Michael Schur

#8. It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.

Michael Schur

#9. Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.

Michael Schur

#10. People don't seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it's pretty straightforward to me.

Michael Schur

#11. There's going to be a lot of people that don't like you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Instead of trying to win them over one by one, you need to do things that are getting huge swaths of votes [in the elections].

Michael Schur

#12. My favorite sitcom of all time is 'Cheers.' That's a perfect example of how, like, people made fun of Cliff, but you never got the sense that they didn't like Cliff.

Michael Schur

#13. If the doors aren't open, just kick them in and keep walking.

Michael Schur

#14. When someone pitches a joke for a character that is just perfect, and you can imagine that actor reading that line at your table read or on the set, it's like the sound of a snap snapping into place.

Michael Schur

#15. My favorite TV show of all time is 'The Wire,' which has the feeling of a project-based show. You draw in people from disparate parts of the world, and they have to work together to achieve a goal.

Michael Schur

#16. The best episodes of 'The West Wing' that dealt with policy and stuff, in my opinion, were the ones where they were in the middle of a crisis, and they were trying to figure out how to solve problems.

Michael Schur

#17. In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.

Michael Schur

#18. You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.

Michael Schur

#19. It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.

Michael Schur

#20. Her work ethic was second to none. And by that I mean: if you made a list of all the levels of work ethics, hers would be just above "none".

Michael Schur

#21. Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.

Michael Schur

#22. All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.

Michael Schur

#23. I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, "How much is this apple?" that person would have an insane name.

Michael Schur

#24. I believe in the importance of sincerity and emotion and honesty in TV, even when it's goofy comedy.

Michael Schur

#25. You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

Michael Schur

#26. For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn't mean the people have to be mean. I've never liked mean-spirited comedy.

Michael Schur

#27. The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.

Michael Schur

#28. I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.

Michael Schur

#29. I think if you're too concerned with being cool or hip or liked, you can't really make good TV because sincerity and coolness are opposites.

Michael Schur

#30. If a show ever tries to be cool, then it's going to be doing something wrong.

Michael Schur