Stephanie Savage Quotes

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

TV is a writer's medium, the writer is in charge effectively. So what you write is what gets shot, so in that sense I prefer it. But in terms of the scale of it, features are fantastic.

I was a novelist first. But in the mid-'80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, 'You know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.'

Something I've really been wanting to do, ever since 'Six Feet Under' ended, was create my own version of this idealized writer's room as well as the ideal family.

Writing for television is completely different from movie scriptwriting. A movie is all about the director's vision, but television is a writer's medium.

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.

I knew 'True Detective' wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop. But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

I love TV, don't get me wrong. But with film, you're just banging out this one product and you're not waiting on another script. You have your script. It's great, in that way.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

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

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

The strangest thing about writing a sitcom, is never knowing if it will become anything but words on a page.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

I always write the script by myself.

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.

TV is a writer's medium.

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.

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I'll always love movies. But there's something I love very much about TV, when you shoot episodes while other episodes are still being written.

With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.

I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.

The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.