Latest Michael Schur Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• My main qualm about TV criticism has been when people review TV the way they review movies. They watch the pilot, and write a definitive review of the show. The obvious analogy is that you don't read the first eight pages of a book and then talk about whether the book works or not. People want so desperately in this day and age to declare something thumbs-up or thumbs-down that they declare it immediately.

  Michael Schur

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Rule number one for the writers when we committed to the jump was: no hoverboards. No one is allowed to pitch that everyone is on hoverboards. It's going to be very very gently sci-fi.

  Michael Schur

  Committed

  "‘Parks and Recreation’ Mike Schur on the eventful season finale". Interview With Alan Sepinwall, uproxx.com. April 24, 2014.

• A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.

  Michael Schur

  Lying, Moving, Eye

  Source: www.hitfix.com

• I find Billy Eichner to be hilarious, though I also imagine that for many, a little goes a long way. Billy provides a kind of comedy the Parks and Recreations show did not have - an insane person screaming at everyone, and our job going forward, as it is with all of our characters, is to develop him and make him more three dimensional.

  Michael Schur

  Character, Long, Insane

  "‘Parks and Recreation’ Mike Schur on the eventful season finale". Interview With Alan Sepinwall, uproxx.com. April 24, 2014.

• I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

  Michael Schur

  Strong, Character, Feelings

  "‘Parks and Recreation’ Mike Schur on the eventful season finale". Interview With Alan Sepinwall, uproxx.com. April 24, 2014.

• In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.

  Michael Schur

  Meaningful, Names, Two

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.

  Michael Schur

  Email, Pure

  Source: www.avclub.com

• People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

  Michael Schur

  Motivation, Selfish, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.

  Michael Schur

  Nice, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.

  Michael Schur

  Motivation, Thinking, Media

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I stopped using Twitter for a while just because I got sick of it and I started using it again, but I don't check the "mentions."

  Michael Schur

  Sick, Checks

  Source: www.avclub.com

• One of the worst things you could do in that world is curse at someone.

  Michael Schur

  World, Worst, Curse

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I am not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I only use Twitter, which I wish I didn't.

  Michael Schur

  Wish, Use, Instagram

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, "How much is this apple?" that person would have an insane name.

  Michael Schur

  Crazy, Python, Names

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.

  Michael Schur

  Couple, Nuts, Plot

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

  Michael Schur

  Real, Character, Cutting

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• Topical-sketch writing were incredibly rational and well reasoned: don't do a joke if the subject doesn't deserve it. An ad hominem attack on someone might get you a cheap laugh, but it doesn't earn you any long-term trust. The biggest rule was: you attack whoever's in power. Don't bring your personal bias to the table.

  Michael Schur

  Writing, Long, Laughing

  Source: www.believermag.com

• You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

  Michael Schur

  Successful, Support Systems, People

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.

  Michael Schur

  Different, Crumbling, World

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• In high school, my friend and I discovered that your cable-access station had to let you do whatever you wanted - it was like the Wild West. We made a couple weird things, like a tribute to the Zucker brothers, where we had a panel discussion about the Naked Gun movies. We wrote a script and made jokes that I'm sure were terrible and showed clips of The Naked Gun without permission.

  Michael Schur

  Brother, Couple, School

  "An Interview with Michael Schur". The Believer Magazine, Issue One Hundred Thirteen, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• The first joke I got on the air I remember clearly. Dennis McNicholas and Robert Carlock wrote a sketch where they were evacuating the Titanic, and the last two guys on the entire ship were the two black guys, Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan. So Will Ferrell was running back and forth, saying, "All first-class passengers get in the lifeboat. All second-class passengers and third-class passengers get in the lifeboat. Let's get all the animals in the lifeboat. Let's put all the empty luggage in the lifeboat."

  Michael Schur

  Running, Animal, Air

  Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, believermag.com. October 1, 2015.

• Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.

  Michael Schur

  Ideas, Decision, Sometimes

  Source: deadline.com

• You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.

  Michael Schur

  Ideas, Settling, Plans

  Source: deadline.com

• I am of the opinion that there is more high-quality television being produced than at any time in the history of television.

  Michael Schur

  Quality, Television, Opinion

  Source: www.digitalspy.com

• I don't know why anybody does anything in the world of television.

  Michael Schur

  Doe, Television, World

  Source: www.digitalspy.com