Matt Groening Quotes

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

I feel like there's a lot of great writing on television.

There's nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

There are a lot of good writers in TV!

It's better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often, writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important.

TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

I mean, there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That's what so cool about being in television right now. Studios, networks are starting to throw more resources, better writers, more production values... and to be part of that is awesome.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

I'm sort lucky in that for me, I'm a writer now. I started as an actor but I'm a writer and so things like 'Wilfred' and shows like that are where I escape to.

The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

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.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

The success of the movie industry comes from the story. And the story comes from somebody putting something down on paper.

I've continued to write fiction since being in television. TV is a different kind of writing, but it's all writing. It was David Milch of 'Deadwood' who helped me to see it that way. We later collaborated on the short-lived 'John from Cincinnati,' but I'm very proud of the work we did together.

I want to be an author/director and I'm writing my second book now and I want to make a movie of it, and I hope I get to do this for the rest of my life.

I want to do more audio originals because I think that it is a fascinating medium. If you think about it, this is original storytelling.

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.

Studios, to cut through the clutter, want recognisable titles. But that does not excuse you, as a writer, from having an original story.

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.