Peter Kay Quotes

The key to any good comic strip or television sitcom is to reset the board at the end of the episode because people like familiarity.

Well, usually, when you're doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it's a 30-minute sitcom, then it's a 35-page script or something like that.

There are a couple of ideas for features that I would love to do. They happen to be comedies.

I would really like to do a really cool one-hour show, maybe on, like, HBO or something like that; or something that I've spent a couple of years developing so it would be exactly the character and exactly in with a huge push behind it; or I would maybe want to do a sitcom; something light and funny.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

I'm good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.

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

What resonates with me whenever I watch a great movie or TV show is the balance of inevitability and unpredictability. And it's a very delicate balance.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

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

Even with college, the reason I wanted to go so badly is because I wanted to major in film. I want to take screenwriting classes and learn more about behind the scenes stuff, because I love people like Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig who are able to write a lot of their own material and be so involved in everything they do.

It's been a fascinating thing because we didn't really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It's been like, we've just sort of grown up a bit and it's amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works.

Working on a sitcom and improv improves your comedic chops. If you do it long enough, the one thing you learn to do is listen to the other characters.

When I was a kid, I used to make up all these characters. I love comedy a lot, and I don't get to do it often. Somewhere in the middle, I shifted into doing drama.

I like the sitcom, as a structure.

We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches.

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

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I think the kick to doing comedy is just to get in a film with really funny people and let them do their jobs. I find that in most comedies, I'm not the funny one, which works out great.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.