I think when you do a season of television you go into it going I'd like the season premiere needs to be amazing. The season finale needs to be amazing.
Probably the biggest challenge is actors, no matter how talented the actor is they don't have the capability of being in more than one place than one particular time, which is very vexing.
I love doing meta-humor, as long as it doesn't become too distracting and it's subtle.
When I first started writing, I had a very difficult time switching between projects, but now it's not only second-nature, it's indispensable: If I stall on one project, I can switch to another and stay productive.
Time away from thinking about something is as valuable - perhaps even more so - than directly thinking about it.
Your subconscious is always working in the background, unlocking things and solving problems.
The guy who sits at the keyboard and types is so much smarter than I am. I think I got into writing so that I could spend as much time with that guy as possible.
Do what you love and you'll always love what you do. I've found that that's true most of the time.
The world's an angry place these days. Let's just not take it out on each other.
I'm always working on something. I wish I had more time for free-thinking and brainstorming new ideas. That's not to say my mind doesn't wander, but I find myself wishing for more of that kind of time.
At some point if you're a professional writer, no matter what, it always comes down to you staring at the blank page by yourself.
I'm very fortunate in that all the mediums I work in are extremely collaborative. Movies are probably the most solitary on a day to day basis, but even then you have producers and studio executives to work with and bounce ideas off of.
There should be nothing I can't live without.
In part, it's so difficult to come up with something original, to come up with a character nowadays. If you created a globetrotting adventurer, he'd be compared to Indiana Jones. If you created a super spy, he'd be compared to James Bond.
At the end of the day, I think the only way to do the kind of job a writer does is push everything aside and just ultimately sit down and do the work.
I'm a very big believer that the reason you've seen this huge surge in superheroes both on television and in film is...part of it of course is zeitgeist. There's no denying that there's a huge appetite on the part of the audience in both TV and film for these kind of adventures.
I think when it comes to television as opposed to film, the producers really are the writers. We work with people who are purely financial producers.
When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.
You can save the city, but having the city be in jeopardy is one thing and having the people you care about be in jeopardy is another.
Time has a certain current to it, and it wants to flow in a certain direction.
I always think the audience sometimes wants what you're not giving them.
