Vince Gilligan Quotes

I love 'Boardwalk Empire,' but there were moments where I thought it didn't have the constant through-line that 'Breaking Bad' did and 'Better Call Saul' does.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

A standard sitcom... is a very standard idea, like these people falling in love and living with each other, and all these people living with each other. It's like, okay, we hooked them up in episode 15, how do we bust that, how do we find a new kernel in it?

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

What I love with 'Game of Thrones' is, every season, I get to continue to develop the existing themes; every season, I also get to write new themes.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.

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.

Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.

In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it.

TV has a three storyline structure, but 'The Killing' takes on that structure with such ambition.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

Every movie is wildly different. So many of the problems are the same, but they take on different guises.