When people have no interest in a subject, it’s very hard to get them to laugh about it. If I had to write ten jokes about potholders, I don’t think I could do it. But I could write ten jokes about Catholicism in the next twenty minutes.
I love that Voltaire was so willing to shock his readers with arbitrary cruelty. And I can completely relate to it.
Launching a new TV show is probably one of the most difficult things that a writer can do.
Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.
As a child, I tried to play by the rules. I got very good grades in school; I was an Eagle Scout; and I believed in all of it.
I find that the creative side of my brain and the archival side of my brain don’t work well together. When I’ve done my best work, I’ve been in a trance-like state.
Advertising is a conscienceless industry, populated by cowards and idiots, that warps and drains everyone. It eggs on the worst in all of us. If I could eliminate either advertising or nuclear weapons, I would choose advertising.
I want to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs. I have wonderful friends who are religious, and I don’t want to say that they’re dimwits. They should certainly be able to pursue what works for them. I’m just saying that it doesn’t work for me and I don’t want to pretend that it does.
I guess I started to realize that being an agnostic was such a wimpy position.
I’m not religious. I do have a baby – a four-month old girl – and that’s a religion in itself.
Instead of three networks you have three hundred or three thousand. Audiences are inundated with programming, and that sometimes gives them a sense of petulant entitlement.
To me, a mark of maturity is realizing that nobody runs the world. Fat cat politicians and secret conspiracies don’t control our lives. In reality, the world is much more complex than that.
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