Writers Room Quotes

#1. I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

Maria Semple

#2. I don't think that I would go into the writers' room because they work really hard and I feel like I'm already working really hard to shoot my part of the show. Also, I haven't written in a writers' room before, it's kinda intimidating to walk in there.

Mary Elizabeth Ellis

#3. 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.

Alex Borstein

#4. 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

#5. There's a need to perfect things in a writers' room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It's a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.

Louis C.K.

#6. In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

Marc Guggenheim

#7. I was only ever part of 'Lost' - a very small part of an extremely talented writers' room, where as a writer, it's sort of your job to sublimate your ego and work in the service of the show and the show's voice.

Brian K. Vaughan

#8. We have a full writers' room, and with something like 'MyMusic,' we've scripted it out with professional writers. There is some very basic improv from the actors, but everything is very to the letter, so it's easy to edit down to an episode. There are fun little things an actor might throw in there.

Benny Fine

#9. I've always said at the beginning of every single season of the show when I was running the show in the writers' room, "This is the last season, so let's smoke 'em if we've got 'em."

Eric Kripke

#10. I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Jill Soloway

#11. I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.

Diablo Cody

#12. I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.

Matt Groening

#13. I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.

Jill Kargman

#14. I think the community that's created within a writers' room is a very interesting topic.

Jim Rash

#15. In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.

Lennon Parham

#16. In my writers' room, which is mostly men, I get a lot of questions like "What would be the quickest way to pass as a seemingly normal guy between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old?"

Mindy Kaling

#17. You know what, I think maybe it's because men like to fart, and the host wants to be able to sit in his writers' room and just pass gas freely. Me, I'm a lady. I'm dainty. I know to get up and leave the room and go to my office.

Wanda Sykes

#18. No one in my writers' room can wear sweatpants.

Amy Sherman-Palladino

#19. All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

Dorothy Parker

#20. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Eudora Welty

#21. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

Anne Tyler

#22. When you're doing an animated series, you tend to pitch storyboards. You write a script and then you draw a comic version of that script and put it up on big boards, and then you pitch it to a big room of executives and writers.

Alex Hirsch

#23. It's remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

Brandt Legg

#24. It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.

Logan Marshall-Green

#25. He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room.

Enrique Vila-Matas

#26. My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That's the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.

Nick Kroll

#27. I don't have a room full of writers pitching ideas. It's just me out of my head.

Louis C.K.

#28. An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.

Gaston Leroux

#29. Some comedians are silly or goofy or straight joke writers who avoid anything subversive or political. Others are drawn to it. The beauty of standup is there is room for everyone, and years of performing in front of crowds will dictate what you can or can't do.

Ted Alexandro

#30. 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

#31. The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

James A. Michener

#32. I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it's a film of theirs or someone else's, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it.

Joe Dante

#33. I always talk to young writers about when you make art in your room, you make art. And when you send it to New York and L.A., you have to be a professional. Of course, when you sell your book rights as an option for a movie, you have to be a professional about that.

Matthew Quick

#34. I can sit in the room with the other writers and just keep saying no until there's something I really like or until I come up with something. In that respect the proportion of what's mine and what's other people's is controlled by me. It isn't even fair to talk about.

Paul Reubens

#35. Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

Christy Hall

#36. You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.

Paulo Coelho

#37. My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.

Joss Whedon

#38. Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.

Margaret Chittenden

#39. I'm not a writer, so I don't know what that looks like, but I can only imagine that you get all those great minds in that room, of those particular writers that created the show, and it's going to be great.

Carrie-Anne Moss

#40. Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.

Rachel Thompson

#41. Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

Melissa Rosenberg

#42. It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard.

Dionne Brand

#43. I have a great job writing for 'The Office,' but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

Mindy Kaling

#44. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.

Rich Sommer

#45. There are writers' rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone's process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.

Jim Rash

#46. To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

Kate Baldwin

#47. Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room.

Keith Buckley

#48. My female writers have always been my backbone. I had a writing room of six women for five years so I know what women do. Cultivated by me, by the way!

Michael Patrick King

#49. There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

Robert A. Heinlein

#50. The writers are so smart, I can only imagine. I would love to be in that room. I love the creative process.

Carrie-Anne Moss

#51. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

Rachel Kushner

#52. Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

Scott M. Gimple

#53. Joe Lansdale is one of the few writers able to write in whatever genre or mode he wants on any particular day. How? He doesn't ask permission. He just steps in, out-writes everybody in the room.

Stephen Graham Jones

#54. When you're doing a pilot, you're doing it in this bubble that almost works against the creative impulse. You don't have time to get to know the actors first, and you have three writers, as opposed to a room full of writers.

Josh Gad

#55. I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.

Sebastian Horsley

#56. Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

Mona Simpson