Bruno Heller Quotes

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

Alcohol causes conflicts, firearms resolve conflicts.

I was sad when the show [Defiance] got canceled. It was heartbreaking for all of us involved. It was definitely a project that everyone involved poured their heart and soul into. But we had three good years, which is, you know, three more years than most shows get.

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

So, what do you think they'll do to him?" I ask. Prim sounds about a thousand years old when she speaks. "Whatever it takes to break you.

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years.

No one ever thinks about what the hell is going to happen 25 years from now.

Jewish people, we don't believe in Hell or a future place to suffer. We're suffering right now. Every one of our holidays celebrates how much we've suffered. Passover - we're celebrating 5,000 years ago, God passed over our houses and murdered all the Egyptians. We're celebrating, 'Hey, thank God we didn't get slaughtered.

It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white... blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.

Fundamentalist Muslim terrorists kill three thousand Americans, but America isn't supposed to respond, because if we respond, they'll respond. We always hear about 'karmic retributions' and the 'cycle of violence' only after we've been hit.

The God-honest truth is that Jeff and I just do what we do. You have no control. We didn't have control last year, or the year before either, or the year before that. We can only do what we do, which is to make the show that we love, continue to follow the path for the stories that we want to tell, tell great and compelling stories, week-to-week, that interest our fans, and really hope for the best.

Most people, you do a TV series, it ends three, four, five years later; it's a relic.

The happy medium is television. And if you find a good suitor, you can do it for years. With movies, you roll the dice. If people don't show that weekend, you're doomed. TV allows you to percolate a little bit, and it gives you a chance for people to find it.

I don't run around shooting people. Much. I only shoot two people a year. Maybe.

You’ve got to visualize where you’re headed and be very clear about it. Take a polaroid picture of where you’re going to be in a few years.

I just don't see anything available that gives any reasonable hope of delivering such a good year and I have no desire to grope around, hoping to 'get lucky' with other people's money. I am not attuned to this market environment, and I don't want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don't understand just so I can go out a hero.

In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.

If I knew where I was going to want to live the next five or 10 years I would buy a home and I'd finance it with a 30-year mortgage... It's a terrific deal.