Seth MacFarlane Quotes

Television is what we're all very attracted to because that's where the best writing and the best characters are.

When I do a movie, I have the script. I know how it begins and how it ends. I know what my character does and where he's going. If I have ideas I want to express or changes I want to make, there's one guy: the director. It's different in television.

I made a rule for myself that the only television things I would do would be my own stories.

I enjoy the acting, but I didn't plan on that. It fell into my lap, and I'm having a lot of fun with it, but I'm definitely moving towards directing because I'm naturally a writer, and I think a good director edits, writes, and has acted a little bit. He's done a little bit of everything, and that's what I'm trying to do.

I freely admit I know nothing about television or writing for the screen.

I feel like there's a lot of great writing on television.

When you write and direct your own film, you basically know exactly what you want. Or you hope to. For the studio, it actually can make life a little easier, because if you have a bunch of questions, they only need to call one person.

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

I feel like I don't have much of a preference. With TV, it's just a longer process, so you need to be more sure that you really want to be involved in it for a longer time than you would be with film.

In all honesty, I've written movies that have been made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.

I don't know necessarily that I would produce under my own company right now. Producing is not something that I'm thinking about. Directing is something that I will be doing very shortly, trying to figure out what to get my hands on. And I can't imagine writing a script and wanting to direct it and not having a producing credit, because I would want to have a big chunk of power on that end, if I wrote something.

I'm directing the Sky show. I'm not going to be in it. I'm just writing and directing it. So that'll satisfy that part of my brain.

I never really thought I went away because I've written all of the movies and I'm produced them all and certainly provided services about and beyond the average producer on two and three. I was on set most of the films and called action and cut a lot of times and did all that good stuff.

The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative

Paddy Chayefksy was writing and it was a time where everybody was happy to be there [on TV].

Everyone that I meet always wants me to direct, but whenever I think of directing, I think of aligning shots. I'd definitely have to write and direct something. But I don't know if I could.

With movies and TV, storytelling, it's a different medium. I really love it, but I'm one part of many, many pieces of that puzzle and a lot of it is out of my control.

[Television] is a great medium for writers, because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write it, you shoot it; it's on TV.

Writing and directing just sort of fell into my lap.

When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

It's a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.

TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.

I think when it comes to television as opposed to film, the producers really are the writers. We work with people who are purely financial producers.

One of the reasons why I agreed to do commercials is that they gave me complete freedom. I just had to have the car in it and write a story around it. I wanted to do something serious set in a Latin American country, but again, it was an exercise in style for me.

I really wanted the house to be a character. And I knew, I said, I'll produce that one, but if I direct it, I need to build a house.