Dan Harmon

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

My best advice about writer__ block is: the reason you__e having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it__ the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from __riting well_ to __riting badly,_ you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don__ like to admit it, because we__e raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let__ just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that__ a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn__ going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it__ no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you__e an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team __ will one day write something good_ to team __ have no choice but to write a piece of shit_ and then take off your __ad writer_ hat and replace it with a __etty critic_ hat and go to town on that poor hack__ draft and that__ your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn__ make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

I think women are different, and I think having them in the room is crucial to a family comedy, ensemble comedy, television comedy, where half the eyeballs on your show are women.

Humankind made these religions; that our brains are capable of doing that is neither something to take too seriously _ because we also make poop, and we learned to flush that the fuck down the toilet _ but it's also not something to totally disregard.

I wish people used wishes to modify themselves instead of others. Wish to be low maintenance. Wish to be autonomous, even.

All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.

Garry Shandling has always been a pioneer of_ meta entertainment. He's always been a defender of the creative right to use the frame as part of the painting.

My cat brought me a toy. I thanked her and threw it. She sat there gave me a look that made me realize people and dogs are the crazy ones.

You can't tell the audience _ well, you can, but I don't like to tell the audience _ that anything they're watching doesn't matter.

Don't be so hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead.

I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.

None of us are bad people. We float around and we run across each other and we learn about ourselves, and we make mistakes and we do great things. We hurt others, we hurt ourselves, we make others happy and we please ourselves. We can and should forgive ourselves and each other for that.

As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people's perceptions. If there's 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven't been caught yet, you tell yourself you're still a birthday clown, and that's how you keep doing it.

I'm always trying to gain and keep the audience's respect. I always want them to know that the show doesn't think they're stupid for watching.

I've discovered a new video game called owning my home.

Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do.