Jim Parsons Quotes

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I always prefer to write songs about emotional situations and heartbreak because I like getting into the character.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

When I'm writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

I'm kind of down for anything, as long as it's an amazing script that speaks to me, so I'm just constantly reading and constantly looking.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.