Ron Carlson Quotes

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there's this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

I really think if you take away a character's obstacles then there's no comedy.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

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

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

The scene is never really about moving the story forward on 'Breaking Bad.' That's the functional veneer of the scene, but it's always about what's going on with the characters.

I think plays have nothing to do with one's own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret - that's what drama is about!

Audiences still crave storytelling.

Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'

You don't put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it's always underneath.

You don't want to have a character say what's bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

We're storytellers - and if the story is told well, you go with the form.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.

Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.