Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

To get a game show into production is as challenging and as intellectually demanding as it is to write a novel or screenplay.

I think the thing that interests most actors these days is the strength and the quality of the writing. I think that's the main thing.

So Disney has their full support behind it, which is great, but again it's got to be the right story. It's got to be a script that's up to snuff and worth going back for. The idea's there, the ambition's there, the excitement's there; but we need to have all the pieces in place before they would ever pull the trigger on that.

When you're just writing, you can do anything with it. But with TV, you've gotta work within certain budget constraints, so you've got to pick and choose your battles.

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.

With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

A series is a big deal, and there are a lot of people out there writing stuff that don't know what art is.

I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.

Whenever you're doing film for television and you look at the budget that you have, which is much more constricted than a movie budget, you think, "God, are they going to be able to do what they say they are?"

Everything you look at now, the scripts that come in that you look at, the television scripts are way better than the movie script. The talent is going to television.

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing.

I want to do film and TV. I want to make good stories. I want to write; I want to be more involved.

One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

One of the things I've learned - before I would go on a show, I was like, "Oh God, I hate that show" or "That show is gonna get canceled." But now after being full-time on a show, you see how difficult it is and how much work goes into it and how so many decisions are based on finances or people's schedules or talent or location issues. It's a miracle that anything gets made.

I'm an entertainer; I try to give the public what it wants while I'm on the screen, and I'm completely sincere about it. If I don't happen to be a laughing boy off the screen, that doesn't make me a hypocrite or a phony.

If anyone thinks my show was 'pretty good,' then I've completely failed.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

I used to be an architect, so I have a series I am working on with USA Network that I created and am co-writing.

The biggest challenge [making Pineapple Express] was that we had a comedy budget. We really got excited the more we got into the development of it about blowing stuff up and having shoot outs. That stuff costs money.

When you're in Los Angeles, everybody you meet is writing a movie, and they want you to be in it. Every cab driver is writing a movie!

I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.