Dan Harmon Quotes

TV tends to be like, if you're lucky, it's like Las Vegas. You can't get out. There's always another pitch meeting. They keep you on the casino floor. If I'm unlucky, if I'm lucky enough to be unlucky, I would love to write a movie.

I was raised on NBC television.

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.

The language we're exchanging, the fillings in our teeth, the pavement on the road outside, everywhere you look, for better or for worse, you're going to see evidence that accepting reality is not a human's tendency, and not what we're good at, and not, in my speculation, what God or Natural Selection hired us to do. We've been hired, by this universe, to dream, to aspire, to make things that weren't real real - and because that involves a lot of failure, we're damn good at doing that, too.

Emotionally, shows like 'Cheers' and 'Taxi' were classic sitcoms when I was growing up.

People often ask me about what constitutes a nerd-friendly show - like, does it have to have sci-fi elements? But I think it's just a show that satisfies the secret craving we all have to be obsessed with something and not feel at all stupid about it.

I am a collaborator with everyone who agrees that I need to be in control. I happily collaborate with my loyalists.

I feel like my life has always been the 'Hey Look at Me Show.' I'm not apologetic about that.

When I was a kid I never knew the difference between a sitcom and a drama. I just knew what my parents were watching and what was making them happy.

I think thoughts in my head bounce around in my skull and, if they keep bouncing around in my skull, they get worse and worse. When they come out of my mouth, they make people happy.

I think that casting is probably the most important thing in television production.

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.

Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.

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.

It was never my direct intention to do anything particularly medium-defying.

I care very much what the fans think. I'm starting to loosen my grip on caring about what critics say, because I think that critics care about what fans think of them, too, so there's a little bit of a refraction there, through that glass.

Television is a populous, derivative, democratic medium.

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.

You have to just look at it like Titanic: I know the ship sinks, but this is a love story

The concept of doing holiday episodes is a huge part of what's fantastic about doing TV. And viewers agree; you see the numbers going up for holiday episodes.

I grew up on network sitcoms. If those are gone when I'm 65 years old, I would never forgive myself for not stepping up to that plate, as often as possible. I'm already bummed out that DVDs are dying off because, in my 20s, those were a huge thing.

I love '30 Rock.' It's one of my favorite shows. It's certainly the gold standard of comedy writing.

I was playing the game where I was going to be a great TV or film writer some day and there was nothing else that I thought about, including other people.

I really like performing for people.

I wish that television would stop selling our hatred of ourselves, and start seducing us with our love of ourselves.

I am absolutely and inherently self-destructive in that I am always making sure I'm doing what I want to do.

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

There's a fine line between a stream of consciousness and a babbling brook to nowhere.

You have people saying two things that seem to contradict each other. One, that we live in a golden age of TV. The other, that television is dying. There's a reason for that. What we mean when we say it's dying is that it's already way past being fragmented into little chunks. Now it's being polarized into an aerosol mist.

With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn't be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons.

Truthfully, I'm pretty stuck in the '80s.

You'll be perfect when you're dead

Always hedge your bets. That's how I do it. I lay all my bets on what I can contribute, and suffer no illusions that I'm generating stuff by myself.

If your ratings are high and there's money being made, you're allowed to be a perfectionist in television.

Yoda is interesting because, in addition to being wise, he is two feet tall, and a Yoda.

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 passion for 'Star Trek' is actually rooted in my love of television and the art of franchise and a premise designed to stick people together that have to figure out what to do.

I say what's in my head, and I'm on honest ground. That is worth so much, and I think it does make my job, as a writer, easier. It makes it possible for me to give people stuff that they like.

Pretty sad. Pretty lonely. But that's how I prefer it? I quess? I guess. It's a good guess. It's the best quess ever.

The public's perception of your show is what it is, and you don't get to complain how people perceive your show or talk about it.

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.

Eight o'clock is hard no matter what network you're on because people have to make a decision to sit down and start watching TV. Every other time slot is a time slot that happens after someone's watching something else.

Audiences, as they get smaller, can intensify their relationship with the product, and so can the creative relationship with the people that you are serving. The good news is that, the more shows there are, the less the conglomerates have to gain by breaking the will of each individual creative.

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.

I always try to use my medium, and if I get into a normal sitcom-writing contest with normal sitcom writers, I'm going to lose.

When you watch the sitcoms that were the big hits when I was growing up, TV was still just TV. It was allowed to just be TV. There were three channels that were competing for the whole family and you couldn't take your business elsewhere.

When you are in the 8 o'clock position, you can either be a cultural phenomenon, or you're endangered. It's a tough time slot.

The most rewarding part of writing for TV is - a year ago I would have said it's just watching it on TV, it's just having been done with it and then collecting all that energy.

There are no normal people, there are just different kinds of weird, all of it is human and all humanity is better than everything inhuman. So I urge you to keep expressing yourself as honestly as you can, and know that the backpedals and second-guesses really aren't necessary - they don't hurt but they're wasting your time - because when you are truly human, as we all are, and when that is your honest message to anyone, you are beyond reproach, there is no way to screw it up.

You don't give someone notes on their performance at a soup kitchen.

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.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn't make you good. Writing badly does.

There are lots of emotions that go with the Fourth of July.

Well, the average person comes home from work really tired, and just wants to flip through channels until they land on the thing that's the least objectionable to them. They're not looking for their new favorite TV show because they know that that search will take forever and they'll go to bed unhappy.

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.

There's the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but there's less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job.

Maybe I am just a jerk.

I'm from Wisconsin so I always feel a little nauseous about begging and trying to trick people into liking me.