Mike Judge Quotes

I'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.

It's just a challenge doing live television every week; you know, it's a challenge to come up with new material every week and stuff like that and try to keep it current, you know what I mean? Like, it's just, you know, it's a kind of a stressful environment.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

When you're working on a television series, you only get a very short off-season. The scheduling of TV is relentless.

I'd been acting since I was a teenager. I'd come to the point where I was writing my own movies of the week for TV. That was fun.

My approach to comedy is that whenever it comes to me, I write it. With 'The Daily Show,' you have to write stuff every day, and that's a new experience for me, to not only write on someone else's schedule but a daily schedule.

Televison is time bound. Whereas a movie has time. You can't write a script for television and keep it for one year.

Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies.

If you have five weeks to write an episode of television or seven months to write a movie or several years to write a book, each of those things is going to be better than a live television show.

There's something helpful about the fast pace of a TV set where everything has to be finished by the end of the week. You have to finish the episode; it doesn't matter how long you have to go on Friday night, but you have to get it done.

We've done things that are faster at times, but it's definitely different when we direct all the episodes because it's like we have to write them all, then shoot them all, then edit them all. So we have to just get ahead on those scripts basically.

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.

It's hard for me to teach and write my own work at the same time.

I don't watch daily soap. I've never seen my shows as well except for the scenes in which I really want to improve something or correct something.

I want to create and write scripted and unscripted shows, digital shows, stage shows.

My only problem, and this has been a constant worry on television, is time management. The deadlines on television are killing.

I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.

If you write a good line, you write a good line, and the best line wins in television. It doesn't matter if you're the guy who gets the coffee or if you're the showrunner - best line wins. That's the beauty of television collaboration.

I constantly have little panic attacks of wanting to change something on a production level, but I let go.

A director must be patient and unflappable. I think I was always pretty relaxed. I don't find shooting as traumatic as some directors do. Some hate it. But you also have to be strong-willed and persistent enough to get what you want.

I make it happen. Who bought Alex Haley's book 'Roots' for TV? Me. I hired the director, hired the writer. I put them all together. I'm like the chef. If I mix all the ingredients right, it's going to taste terrific. If I don't, it's not going to come out good.

WWE is so huge, and they have to crank out so many hours of television, so they don't have time to take the care and attention to detail for the entire roster.

I finally achieved my dream by being a TV showrunner.