Jonah Hill Quotes

When you do a television show in the States, you get the pilot, and then it's the great unknown. That's the way it is. It's this great leap of faith. It's the Russian roulette of art.

I got into television, and I'm a television guy, so I've never really had a movie career.

I've been on one TV series after another. None of the network decisions have ever made sense to me.

Television shows, especially hour-longs, are hard, tiring work. Those people are very tired and very rich. But they're working really hard, and to create the illusion of having the time of your life like that, you really got to give it up to the people who do it.

The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

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

Film people are coming into TV, because they can't get any work.

When you're making TV, the last thing you want to do is watch TV. It's too much.

There are so many people in film and television that get between a performer and the audience, and that's frustrating.

I've sold shows based on my standup twice to CBS, but they've never gone past the script stage. TV is very competitive.

I've never been in the studio world; TV is as close as I get to the more corporate approach to making entertainment.

Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.

My experience in TV is that it takes time for shows to find their way.

I think that the reason you keep hearing that it's the golden age of TV is because original storytelling is happening all the time in that medium, and people are hungry for it. And I'm as guilty as anyone for being part of an industry that is capitalizing on existing stories, sequels, these things that we are seeing again and again and again.

There's so much great TV and I always thought it would be such a fun little sideway to make money and then not have to worry about my films making a lot of money.

It's a really incredible time to be working in television.

Between the marriages, I shagged my way round television studios like a mechanical digger.

He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; He who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion.

Tell me you're crazy, maybe then I'll understand.

Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.

Halfway through Numbers, I got really jaded, and I had these unrealistic expectations about what Numbers could be. I thought it should be Emmy-nominated. I was in my mid-20s, so I was kind of shortsighted and silly.

My film isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.

This time I m not going to tell you a story. I'll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there.

TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside.