Jim Gaffigan Quotes

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.

I have respect for anyone who helps a creator put a great television show on the air.

When I do a movie, I have the script. I know how it begins and how it ends. I know what my character does and where he's going. If I have ideas I want to express or changes I want to make, there's one guy: the director. It's different in television.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

'Let's Get Harry' was where I met Bob Singer and worked with him for the first time, and then 'Reasonable Doubts' was the second time, and there was a thing after that called 'Charlie Grace' that was the third time. I liked working with Bob. A nice man and a good partner.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Once you've agreed the script, you must be willing to go as far as it needs to go on set.

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.

No great television show has ever rested on just one person. They're all about great ensembles and storytelling.

As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.

I am the luckiest old broad on two feet if the truth were known. It's - but it all goes back to 'Mary Tyler Moore,' 'Golden Girls,' all those - actors love to take the credit. We couldn't do it without the writers.

In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.

I'd been working with Chuck Lorre since the dawn of time, starting with 'Dharma and Greg,' so when I get a call about a really cool opportunity to work with him, I say yes, even before I know what it is.

I always wanted to work with David Milch.

I think, with TV, you create kind of a family to work with.

I'm not someone who comes onstage and says, 'I'm rewriting this now.' I don't think it's fair to the writers or the director, or the other actors.

In the world of book writing, there's a few people, maybe, where you have close relationships. In TV, there are so many more relationships, and they're all so critical.

Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino gave me such a gift with 'Bunheads,' and to give me this gift of going on 'Gilmore Girls' was beyond. It was awesome.

As actors, we need to do our parts exactly the way they have visualised it, because if we don't, we have to keep doing it many times over.

Being on 'Veep,' it's so much fun, and I get to put so much creative input in there, but at the end of the day, what they say, I do.

I am completely a director's actor. If the director gives me the liberty and freedom, then I give my inputs. Otherwise, I just follow instructions.

The writer is just so much more intimately involved in the television process than the feature film process.

I have realised I am a director's actor.

On my very first show, my partners in it, Oprah Winfrey and her network, and studio, Warner Horizon, who doesn't get enough credit, said, "Lady, we're going to let you call the shots the way you want to."

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.