Tv Writers Quotes

#1. I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.

Jill Soloway

#2. The amount of work that TV writers and executives do is incredibly hard. I'm shocked that these people will hand in three outlines and two scripts, and everybody has to read them and give notes on all of them, even the writers.

Zak Penn

#3. 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.

Rachel Bloom

#4. My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

James Nesbitt

#5. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

David Foster Wallace

#6. I have a pretty big TV background, and I have clocked so many hours in so many writers' rooms over the years.

Suzanne Collins

#7. I'm a human just like any of the people that you adore, whether they're in TV shows or movies or they're writers or YouTubers. Their lives are not perfect.

Tyler Oakley

#8. In TV, you don't know everything. The writers only give you scripts before you shoot the episodes. They keep you on your nerve.

Yasmine Al Masri

#9. There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

Lucas Neff

#10. I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize.

Danny Strong

#11. I think that if you're improvising on TV, it's a great way to help the dialogue between actors and writers.

Zach Woods

#12. Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

Piers Anthony

#13. The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.

M. Night Shyamalan

#14. All of us have a 'voice' inside where all inspired thoughts come from. When I talk to children and aspiring writers, I always ask them to turn off the TV and listen to that voice inside them.

Patricia Polacco

#15. The Shield made me realize there were great opportunities for writers in TV.

Nick Antosca

#16. The expectation that TV women need to be more likeable than men is bullshit and in need of a change.

Mindy Kaling

#17. There's a great myth about cartoonists, writers and people that are on TV.

Shel Silverstein

#18. Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

Kevin Spacey

#19. What happens is that the experience of writers working together and the idea of creative collaboration is so delightful, but it has been relegated to TV.

Akiva Goldsman

#20. The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.

James Wolcott

#21. It's nice to have writers write nice things about you and guys on radio and TV say nice things about you, but the guy who's in the locker next to you is the one you play the game for.

Joe Torre

#22. When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

Aaron Sorkin

#23. 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.

Chris Pratt

#24. 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.

Ted Sarandos

#25. There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

Carrie Coon

#26. TV is the place that writers want to be.

Ayelet Zurer

#27. Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

Matthew Specktor

#28. After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.

Jill Soloway

#29. TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

Vince Gilligan

#30. I've read a lot of fiction from writers just starting out, and the dialogue is a little bit forced, or it's almost too teenager-y, or too slang-y or putting too much technology or trends in there. I try to stay pretty trend-neutral. I try not to mention too many current bands or current TV shows.

Sara Shepard

#31. TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.

Melissa Rosenberg

#32. A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers' low-definition (LD) vocabulary.

John R. Dallas Jr.

#33. 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?

Luanne Rice

#34. The problem with reality TV is that creative writers are not involved; TV folks are, and some journalists who will only mine the surface of subjects. Hard work necessary for discovering and delineating the intimacies of the subjects they capture is mostly avoided.

Lee Gutkind

#35. When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

Jeffrey Klarik

#36. With comedy, I think it's so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.

Jay Harrington

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

Douglas Coupland

#38. TV is gratifying in the long-term. We [writers] find ourselves knowing who we can go to for a laugh, or who we can go to for a good emotional moment, and then milking those things.

Michael Brandt

#39. Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.

Jeff Daniels

#40. I remember one of my writers on 'Weeds' got a new apartment and didn't get cable or a dish. He just hooked his computer up to the TV. I was like, 'This is it. This is how it's happening.'

Jenji Kohan

#41. Everyone talks about reality TV and that there are no roles left. That's false. Years ago, there were three networks. Now there are 20 cable networks and so many ways for films to be exhibited. It's an exciting time for actors, writers, directors, and producers.

Corbin Bernsen

#42. One of the things that's fun about TV is it grows, and you set goals and aim towards stuff, and one of the writers has an idea, and you say, 'Ooh, that's so much cooler. Let's do that instead.' It's so much more fluid and organic that way, and that's the most fun part about it.

Jed Whedon

#43. The writers' strike a couple years ago was a bonanza for reality TV shows new and old.

Carole Nelson Douglas

#44. One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

Carla Gugino

#45. The really important people in TV are not the directors; they're the writers.

Mary Harron

#46. If you are going to be on TV for however many years, you want to make sure that you have writers that are giving you something to work with, and I got that in spades.

Michael Shannon

#47. There's one thing about TV that I really think is true. If you find the right cast and the right writers, and you got some chemistry going, even if a show is taking a little while to find an audience, if you keep it there, that audience will find it. Because that's what happened with 'Cheers.'

Rhea Perlman

#48. TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

Howard Gordon

#49. 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.

Rob Lowe