Justin Theroux Quotes

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

There's this sense of excitement because you invent and control the characters. You decide whether they live or die. I find this type of creative process tremendously stimulating.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

I'm still auditioning and doing other movie parts, but I really like the developing and the writing. You have more control over your destiny.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

At some point, I would like to start creating my own things. If people don't write the scripts I like, then I will do my own.

As a writer for six years, I wrote my own TV, which, I was the only person in the WWE that could probably honestly say, since day one in NXT, they wrote their own material.

That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.

Filmmaking was the way I could write characters and not have to give them up to anybody.

A good script can come from anywhere.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.