Jim Parsons Quotes

To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you're inventing a world, you're inventing characters. If they're interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for five more episodes. How incredibly frustrating would it be to just do one movie?

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

I'll always love movies. But there's something I love very much about TV, when you shoot episodes while other episodes are still being written.

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.

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.

I want to tell Miranda's story more broadly than what I have been in these five-minute videos on the Internet. She can live in a longer format.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

They baffle me where they go with the storylines... we used to be a Golden Globe winning show.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

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

The first time that I saw people actually make the thing that I wrote was my first episode of 'Six Feet Under.' It was called 'Back To The Garden.'

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

You know, it's a big version of an episode, which I think is necessary at this point because we're drawing in people who not only people who have seen the show before and are devoted to it, but people who have never seen it before.

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.

We're trying to tell a very full story of 'Nashville' and these characters in Nashville, and I'm really hopeful that we're going to be able to do something as innovative as 'American Horror Story' and 'Friday Night Lights.' And I think so far, we're on the right path for that.

And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

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.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.