There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot, every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

Probably your first agent is going to be some guy who also handles dog acts.

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.

When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.

The State trained us to make other people's terrible jokes work, which is the other part of the game when you're here.