Denis Leary Quotes

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

My first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.

The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

The director in TV and the writer and the creator are working very much hand in hand.

But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines.

I've continued to write fiction since being in television. TV is a different kind of writing, but it's all writing. It was David Milch of 'Deadwood' who helped me to see it that way. We later collaborated on the short-lived 'John from Cincinnati,' but I'm very proud of the work we did together.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.

In the world of book writing, there's a few people, maybe, where you have close relationships. In TV, there are so many more relationships, and they're all so critical.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

I'd worked with Matt Strevens on 'Adventure in Space and Time' and he's a great friend of mine.

Writing 'Father Ted' with Arthur Mathews was like being hooked up to a drip full of endorphins.

I'm often asked for advice on how to go about making comedy shows like the begrudgingly accepted 'IT Crowd'.

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.

Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.

When I talk to Ryan Murphy or Ali Adler about my past or things in my personal life, occasionally pieces of that will end up in the script, and I think that's true of everybody. It's true of that entire writer's room, certainly of Ryan and Ali. I think that he writes really well for actors, for his actors, and he writes to their strengths. I always feel very well taken care of with him.

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.

What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.

I write all my scripts with Salman in mind. He understands me perfectly on the sets.

The thrill of doing television versus features is, in television, you get to focus more on the characters.

I'm running out of time, and a Western is America's answer to a Greek tragedy, so that's what we did. [Kiefer] hired Brad [Mirman] to write the script and he had the ideas, and then he and I did stuff on the script to make it a little cleaner to ourselves. And then, we played it. We were just actors working together, and our DNA must have informed it somehow. Certainly, we came out of it purified a little bit.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.