Thomas Lennon Quotes

If you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important.

The more people's money you take to do something, the more inputs you get.

The first record I bought with my own money was Rio.

Waiting for opportunities in the entertainment industry is an impossibility; they are not coming. You have to make your own.

People love that monkey torture.

If you're a studio writer, the funny better be on the page.

All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.

Writing studio movies is the best job in the world... it's awesome.

I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.

I feel like I'm the most well-adjusted character on the show, even though I'm sure the other actors would tell you the same thing about their characters.

I think people were not expecting us [with Robert Ben Garant] to, they were just like, "Well here come the writers," but we both were coming out of a sketch comedy background, so when we pitch a movie, we play every character in the film. You act it out, you perform it - you do a 10-minute performance of the movie.

When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.

Don't write something that is your passion project because all it will do is get the passion stomped out of you.

The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague.

I'm always doing what I can to look for and just feel out funny things that are happening in the scene and improvise off of them.

The best thing that happened during the filming of Out Cold is that I forged a friendship with Lee Majors that endured for almost 12 weeks.

Yes, I am complimented on my work in Kids in the Hall once or twice a week. Its a nice feeling.

Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie ever but about 99% of the time, that's what happens.

Being a movie star is stressful as hell. You've got to do crunches all day long. You've got to get up and learn lines.

It's such a great thing to work with people and not have a plan.

Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it.

You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you've done.

That's the other thing about working on movies, the commitment is years. That's one thing that's so frustrating about the process is that it goes on and on and on for years.

People kept passing our [ with Robert Ben Garant] script around, and suddenly we had this reputation as screenwriters, which we're not - we're sketch comedy guys.