Gene Roddenberry Quotes

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

This is one of my lesser moments, and one I'm not proud to admit to, but there's always a time I feel the need to have control over the process and try to defend the song from the person I'm writing with. It never, ever helps and always causes problems.

What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.

That's the hard part of television: When you walk into the network tests, you're signing away seven years of your life.

In film school, you get skills, but then you get lackey jobs, working on projects that you probably don't care about. And there's something in me where I just couldn't bring myself to edit some misogynistic rom-com or movies that I would have hated to be a part of. So I knew I just wouldn't get any work because of that.

There will always be some films that the audience would like and some that they don't. But if I start becoming a slave to appreciation, I will be subjecting myself and my talent to one particular type of taste. I don't want to do that.

We often compare the experience of writing a book to that of playing God. It is up to us, and only us, to determine what happens to the people we invent. It is for us alone to determine what is good and bad, just and unjust, appropriate and inappropriate for the worlds we create. I love that about writing books.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

Sometimes my characters are not myself.

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

I'm happy to try any genre, from drama to comedy and anything in between. Although, to be fair, for most of my career, I've been at the mercy of what people are willing to put me in.

The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.

One gets started, and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use . . . the moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I'm just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.