Pamela Adlon Quotes

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

Paul Riser tells it in an interesting way; he dissects it and tells the structure, you know, 'you don't mention that part here.' But that's what's interesting about it and the people who are absent are interesting too.

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.

My take on 'Lucifer' was pretty much laid down by Tom Kapinos when he wrote the original pilot script for it. I remember reading it for the first time, and I was about four or five pages in, thinking this is so funny, and I know how I would want to do this if I was going to do it.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character.

I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

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.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I find that on serialized television it's wiser to hit the ground and look forward, and take the cues from the writers and the events happening, otherwise you just tie yourself in knots.