Mel Rodriguez Quotes

For 'Breaking Bad,' it was like, that's one of the best pilots, probably the best pilot I have ever read.

It's not that I don't enjoy a good mystery that comes and goes in a hour. I do, but God, 'Breaking Bad' and 'Saul' unfold like novels.

Even though 'Glee' is sometimes a hard road, I am very excited about writing a multi-year arc.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

'The Wire,' I was such a fan of that show the first season - I think that's the best-written show on TV.

I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.

I just have to let the story go the way it needs to go and let them take the detours they want to take, and I'll get to the end.

I think one of the reasons for the success of 'Breaking Bad,' and now for 'Better Call Saul,' is that we have been blessed by AMC and Sony with enough time to figure things out.

I've always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending.

At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.

It's the cable shows that are really the most interesting - 'Mad Men,' 'Breaking Bad,' those shows are really the premiere shows on television right now.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

Typically on a TV series, the writers on a show are writing for their life almost every episode. When someone sits down to write a Netflix show, they know there's going to be a 13th hour.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

My feeling is, from when I started on 'Breaking Bad,' there's no reason to pick and choose because every episode is great. Whatever episode you get, you're lucky to do it.

'Breaking Bad' has definitely opened many, many doors for me.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.