Michael Chabon Quotes

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

I think that comics and television, as mediums, go hand in hand. Both tell long-form, continuing stories that are parsed out into little chapters and, if are successful, continue for years and years. What that means to me, as a writer, is it tells stories of transformation and evolution as characters.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

Crime shows are really popular, in general, but usually, at the end of every episode, you have to let go of the people that you've invested in and then, the next week, get somebody else.

I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film.

You can do things with TV that you just can't do on film. There's so much more time: there's the opportunity for development, and you can let things lay dormant for a period. You can't really do that in two hours or three hours in a movie that often, I would say.

I can't imagine soaps will ever stop, because people will always watch as long as they have great stories and characters. But the soaps will have to keep evolving, won't they?

One of the things that set us apart early on, as opposed to other animated shows, was the fact that 'Bojack' was continuous and serialized.

The network wants you to make a thing that's just a stand-alone episode, so you never get any character or continuity. This is one of the ways in which television can actually be good, and even better than the movies, because it gives you a chance to tell a long story.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

What's so great about TV is that you can get an opportunity to tell really rich stories, over the course of so many hours. It's like a novel of this type of medium.

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

I'm such a huge fan of television and what's happening in television, right now. You are able to visit characters and visit a story, week to week, push things in a different way than you can in a film, and you are able to go deeper, simply because you have more time. I'm just excited to do that. It's always good to do new things.

In TV, you can really get into not only great characters, but also the relationships. There are all of the backstories and all of the relationships that you have with every person in your life, and the relationships those people have with each other. It's just more dense and there's more time to tell stories.

The great thing about working on a genre show is that you can basically have a season finale where every character is left destroyed, and then hit the reset button and come back for the next season.

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

Writers get to know me very well. It always serves me in the end because I feel I have a deeper understanding of the character and sometimes they really like my ideas and they use them.

What people like are things to laugh at. Funny shows. It's all in the execution, the writing and the characters, not the setting. And the writing and the execution and the characters are GREAT on (Everybody Loves Raymond).

For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.