"From my own experiences I've learned that quirky, different, fringe projects that may only be cult, often travel a lot better internationally. Mainstream comedians and TV shows that might be the biggest thing, on say, UK TV for a while, often don't sell a sausage around the world. Comics selling out arenas in the UK often can't sell a ticket in America or many other places."

"It may take weeks or months to research an investigative story for television, I can write the script in one day.  If pressed, I could write the script in an hour.  But there is no way I could write a novel in any less time than, say, nine months.  No matter how much pressure there is. ... It is much more layered, textured, complicated.  And it is all from my imagination."

"The broadest, most inoffensive, mainstream hits are so often the least 'talked about.' They just happen and wash over a disconcerting majority once a week. Again, this is fine if you just want commercial success but it's soul destroying if you have loftier ambitions."

"I'm trying to find truths that are underrepresented on screen, to embrace nuance and ambiguity."

"The movie or TV show is the finished product; a screenplay is not.  Scripts are only one step in a complex chain of events leading to the final show or film."

"Today, thanks to certain pioneering authors, some great books, and some great movies and TV series, the wall between genre and mainstream fiction has become not a wall, but a river.  It can be forded or bridged."

"As an artist, you want as many people to see your work as possible with no compromise.  .... I don't want to .... have it watered down, and follow a soap opera, and have all the edges filed down and have someone interfere.  ....  Delivering the exact thing that I made ... that's so important to me, you know, that's, I said, the ideal of the most beautiful and purest thing. And it's how little it can be ruined from your brain to the observer. And that's the way you do everything yourself, really, because, you know, I've probably only produced and directed to protect my writing, the idea, you know?"

"Sometimes you might think of TV as writing a long novel, but it's kind of not.  You have to do a very strong short story to start with."

"There's no upside to holding back plot.  ....  If you've got a great idea, that great idea doesn't wait until season two.  It goes in the third act.  You can keep inventing more plot, but you can't invent more audience.  You have to have the faith in yourself... that there will be another good idea."