Jeff Kinney Quotes

The one thing we pride ourselves on the most with writing 'Car Share' is that it's hard to predict what's going to happen and that's hard to achieve, especially with comedy.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Giving consumers the choice of having it all in one big bite means different viewers are in many different places in the book, making it hard to discuss without spoiling the plot. The intervals between first-run programming provide a space for communion and that tantalizing sense of anticipation.

In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

Jeff Eastin is good in that he'll tell me a plot twist that's coming up if he thinks it would be something Peter would know ahead of time, and if it's something that would be a surprise to Peter, I'll tell Jeff, 'Oh, don't tell me. I don't want to know.' And then it's exciting to read it and exciting to play it.

I love serialized stories of any kind. I'm a huge sucker for any kind of series.

Oh, yeah, I've seen 'Seinfeld' 1,000 times.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

Part of my writing style can be attributed to my mother's impatience with comedy, because whenever I told her a story she would say, 'Yeah, yeah, just tell me: is it good for you or bad for you?' Consequently, I think, I was always afraid to indulge in the time that you need to tell a joke, very nervous about anything that constituted an Act II.

There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.

What I always got excited about with 'Arrested Development' was the element of surprise.

You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?

A lot of the time, a comedy script is just dialogue, and that's the main thing you have to worry about.

When you have 12 hours of storytelling, the cool thing about it is that you get to really leave people with question marks, but hopefully wanting to come back.

Through eight years, 'How I Met Your Mother' has mastered the art of leading-edge comedy, emotional water-cooler moments, and pop culture catch-phrases.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

Indian audiences these days aren't really interested in watching a character on screen evolve. They don't want to see a young girl evolve into being a partner and enter motherhood - they are only really concerned about the story. As long as the story is getting interesting with every passing episode, they want more.

Humor has the tendency to be funny once. If I tell you a joke, we're going to have a big laugh. But the second time I tell the joke, it's going to be a bit strange, and the third time you're going to ask if there's something wrong with me. So I am very cautious with jokes, but there is a lightness in my work.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

What was important for 'Legacies' to actually be a successful show is that we had to introduce new mythology.