Tracy McMillan Quotes

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

I think writers have become hypnotised by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character.

I try to give all my characters a sense of humor, so I guess I feel like I have done comedy, but maybe I'm better known for drama.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

One of the things I was taught was how you deal with language. It's important, very important in comedy.

Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.

I like to write, I like to do stand-up, I like to act.

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.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

I'm really bad at writing jokes.

You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.

Part of my writing style can be attributed to my mother's impatience with comedy, because whenever I told her a story she would say, 'Yeah, yeah, just tell me: is it good for you or bad for you?' Consequently, I think, I was always afraid to indulge in the time that you need to tell a joke, very nervous about anything that constituted an Act II.

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.

Drama is easy. Comedy's hard.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

I'm not really good at character or plot development. I'm just interested in big comedic moments.

It's difficult to differentiate between a story that's humorous and clever and one that actually makes people laugh out loud.

A lot of the time, a comedy script is just dialogue, and that's the main thing you have to worry about.

When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.

Writing and telling jokes is my favorite thing to do, and I want to be able to do that forever.

I want to try something on situational comedy.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.

I'm a huge David Lindsay-Abaire fan. If I could write, I would want to write like him.