Forced Narrative Quotes

A lot of Christmas episodes feel like stories in quotation marks. Uh, a homeless guy comes to live with them and they all learn a lesson. That didn't come from an organic place.

A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you.

The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.

Oh gosh, I'm completely allergic to historical dramas. Particularly those around the civil-rights movement. It's not my favorite thing to watch. So often they feel like medicine. Or not even a history lesson, because I really like history. Just... obligatory.

When you're trying to force things in a script, it seems like it's getting somewhere, but it isn't real or interesting. All the bad material you've written becomes an albatross around your neck. So I really don't like writing a lot of bad stuff, I prefer to just keep narrowing it down to stuff I think is solid.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

I think about 'The Simpsons,' which has been going on for 25 years. Homer is still in his late 30's. Lisa is 8, Bart is 10. Their stories are told. Yet the series keeps going on and on like a zombie that won't lie down and die. That feels forced and unnatural. The characters never change, grow, age.

I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

I won't be a pundit because you have to be saying certain things that you might not even want to, but you have to.

I have a lot of scripts that come my way, and some of them take a bit longer to read than others. There are a lot of things that I have to pass on because I'm just not into it, and sometimes the story is slightly forced.

I don't like family stories forcefully mixed with commercial elements.