Rob McElhenney Quotes

I tend not to read the size of the production into a script when I'm reading it. It's just something you respond to or not and I do think it's very dangerous to say it's time now to do this or it's time now to do that.

Everyone will always have ideas about how to make your work better. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. Start it differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby, and you know what's best.

I never know if my picture is a good picture or a bad picture, because I'm not making pictures thinking of the public, I'm making pictures to realize myself.

You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not secretary of state; I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.

Acting, music, painting... it's very subjective. So what I might think is a great actor, you might think is not a very good actor at all.

The filmmaker is not telling you what to think.

Again and again one can listen: this is my opinion, I think this or that... As if it matters, what one or the other thinks! The point is much more to what the truth is!

If it's something I feel I can do alright, I like being in those, and some that I think Rob Schneider and David Spade would be funnier at than me, I tell them to do it. I don't have any clue how we decide. There's this thing, this "Click", actually, one of my friends called me up, my partner told me about this idea that Steve Koren had. Steve Koren, by the way, the guy who wrote it with Mark O'Keefe, Steve Koren I've known since I was 22. He was a page at Saturday Night Live.

My fellow actors inspire me a lot and really good writing inspires me. And then trying to stick to the decision to only do something that I think will challenge me and that I, personally and very subjectively, I think is good not do something because I think it will bring me a lot of money or bring me a lot of awards. I've tried to very, very rigorously be highly subjective about what I do. And that's something that I think I have basically lived by.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.

Being able to hear an opinion. And then how to apply that opinion is something I am learning and working with every day. What can be tricky is how to differentiate a good suggestion that you should apply to your work [from] someone's personal taste at their opinionated best.

Thinking is hard. Making value judgments is difficult. It places you at pure creation, because there are so many times you'll have to say, "I don't know. I just don't know." Yet still you'll have to decide. And so you'll have to choose. You'll have to make an arbitrary choice. Such a choice - a decision coming from no previous personal knowledge - is called pure creation. And the individual is aware, deeply aware, that in the making of such decisions is the Self created.

No book is of much importance; the vital thing is, What do you yourself think?

A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.

I say what's in my head, and I'm on honest ground. That is worth so much, and I think it does make my job, as a writer, easier. It makes it possible for me to give people stuff that they like.

Never allow others to think you always have the best answers. This will only make them dependent on you.

I don't take much stock in other people's opinions if I think something's good.

I think David Yates was just like, "You've got on with it for a few years, I'm gonna let you off the hook." And also, I think it's because the action side of stuff that we were doing, it was going to be very difficult to do all that with all the prosthetics on. It was gonna be hard work, and I think they just said, "You know what?" I think they put a level of trust in me, as well. They said, "You know, we're gonna let Neville Longbottom lose the fat suit, lose the teeth, lose the Adolf Hitler hair."

I think we ought to have a new rule: You can ask two questions, and then we can pick the one we want to answer.

What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong.

I have no other but a woman's reason: I think him so, because I think him so.

I actually think in music, learning technical stuff doesn't matter. You can be as technical as you like, but still sound awful.

My idea of quality is my own idea of quality. What I do and what I want to do next is my business. The next thing I fall in love with might be what you think is rubbish.