I can say with pride verging on smugness that I've got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.
You'll go out of business if you think people are stupid.
Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.
I can't see what's wrong about assuming intelligence in your audience and what's bad news about being rewarded for assuming that.
I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it.
Well, I'm permitted to say anything I like. I just don't.
I absolutely love television, and I don't mean to be vulgar, but as I keep having to explain to people from the movie industry, I get more power and more money doing television, so why on earth would I do a film?
My priorities are where they should be, which is making really great, really exciting television.
Nothing can ever be a rule in drama, because then you're saying certain things won't ever happen, and that would be very boring.
I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.
I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.
The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.
When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.
If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most men are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience.
