“For a writer, talent is everything. Lots of people make a career out of writing, producing many works and knowing exactly what it takes to become a great writer. But they never break into the big time, because they lack one thing: talent, or a sufficient amount of it.”

“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

“There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.”

“No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

“…because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.”

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

“The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed.”

“Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.”