James Roday Quotes

At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.

As creators, we feel constant demand for innovation from the world. This puts immense pressure on the creative process and oftentimes can have a dampening effect.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

That's the thing about 'The Daily Show' - we're doing four shows a week, so we can't be too precious about what's going on.

When you're making a show or a movie, there are a million people and things in your way. As an actor, you're like a glorified session musician or player. You really are.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

When I create something, it's got to be special, and it can't just be to throw something out there because I feel like I'm Missy.

When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.

Nobody ever thinks that the work they're going to do could ever be bigger than the one they do before, especially if you're lucky enough like I had to have such a huge thing as 'Phantom' was.

Sequels are generally done in a rush. They're done with a sense of urgency. The first time, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second time, you don't. Your expectations are different, and your motivations are different.

I had my whole life to write a bunch of crappy songs and then play them in front of people and think, 'All right, that one out of these seven is really good; it's a keeper.' But on this second album, to be honest, I probably wrote about 50 songs where I was just trying to write a hit.

I'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I've been lucky enough that in the U.K., I've done shows that have aired once a week. I make a show there that runs seasonally, and we make one episode a week, and that is great - the value of time. You can really think and finesse what you want to do.

Other than Peter Jackson doing 'Lord of the Rings,' I don't get it when filmmakers follow up a movie with a sequel to the same movie. God bless 'em if they can be up for it, but that would drive me insane.

I don't think there's any show that really escapes it: It's very rare that a creative producer stays with the show. As soon as the producer leaves, they cut the budget.

Many composers are asked to come up with three great songs in ten days... But it's rare for us to pull that off. You cannot force the brain to make a great song and I'm very scared of doing bad work.

It's such an enormously challenging process to make any kind of television. It's stressful and works towards getting the best out of creative people.

On American sets, you work 12-, 14-, 16-hour days sometimes. All that volume over a short course of time can actually be less conducive to telling a story accurately.

There's a misconception that, as you have success with a band for a long time, things get easier, and that's not necessarily true. It's harder to keep connecting with that fire that got you started in the first place when you're amongst all the politics in the business, and just having a little bit of that looming pressure.

Every show finds its groove, I would say. The first season is the season to figure out the dynamics, the workflow.

I kind of tend to write a lot of songs, so it's never too hard for me to finish an album; it's more about just getting enough songs that I really love.

Every one of us at Pixar is worried that we're going to be the one to make the dud.

I'm not the type of person who makes a lot of songs in a day just to see which one is the best.

When you record an album in six days, you don't have time to work out a lot of stuff.