Time has a certain current to it, and it wants to flow in a certain direction.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Time away from thinking about something is as valuable - perhaps even more so - than directly thinking about it.