William Fichtner Quotes

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script.

[Noah Hawley] just a fantastic writer. It's always about the script, it's always about the book; it always is. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage. That's what attracted me to him first and foremost.

The best writers are gravitating to that world. What's rewarding also is this: you have a two hour movie, you can't really delve into character that much. In a TV show you can. You can delve into character. You can get into nitty gritty.

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

I've continued to write fiction since being in television. TV is a different kind of writing, but it's all writing. It was David Milch of 'Deadwood' who helped me to see it that way. We later collaborated on the short-lived 'John from Cincinnati,' but I'm very proud of the work we did together.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

In Australia, I wrote lots of little plays and put them on, and then I worked on a few different TV shows, like the Australian equivalent of 'SNL.' I would write and perform all of my characters.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

I wanted to do screenwriting. That's what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got 'The Daily Show', I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

My education - my Ph.D. in storytelling - comes from having worked on it, being a lover of film and watching them, from working with some great writers and some very good TV directors and then working with some who weren't.

There are a lot of good writers in TV!

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.