Seth MacFarlane Quotes

Nobody sets out to offend or shock for the sake of shocking. You set out to get laughs.

There are times when I'm under the weather and the corporate machine tries to put me in the recording booth anyway. It's always up to me to say, 'Guys, listen to me, listen to what I sound like. I'm not myself.'

I distrust all television doctors.

The resistance to science is idiotic.

When 'Family Guy' started, we wanted to make it more like a sitcom. And there was very little music.

Fox is notorious for having a very thick skin about taking shots at themselves.

I cannot tell good art from bad art. I have no eye for it.

I have a car that I like - an Aston Martin - for Sunday drives in the country.

Evolution doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, no more than gravity does. I want to rekindle excitement over what we've achieved as a species with the space program. We can't afford to regress back to the days of superstition.

The only problem is time.

I think at times I read too much of my own press. I wish I was better at taking in how great my life is, but that's surprisingly elusive. I tend to be very hard on myself and insecure about failing no matter what happens.

I'm wide open to getting married, but actors are not easy people to date. You end up sharing that person with this other mistress that is their career. I very much like the traditional courtship method of making a date. That's what they do in normal places, but Hollywood's not normal.

With any half-hour comedy, it kind of takes on its own life and finds itself.

I'll tell you what I think is not okay. Have you ever seen that show on MSNBC, 'Lockup?' It's a reality show that takes place inside a prison. Do the prisoners have to sign release forms? Or do they have to be on it whether they like it or not?

I was a big Fred Flintstone fan.

I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail.

Chris Elliott could read the phonebook and he's funny.

If something is shocking without being funny it's hard to justify.

I was a huge 'Star Trek' fan. I loved the 'Twilight Zone' growing up. In the future, I hope to create some thoughtful, sci-fi drama.

At one point, I was hell-bent on being a Disney animator, and sort of got over that in college and wanted to do my own stuff. You know, towards the end of college I had actually planned to go to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater.

Most of the outrage comes from not the public, but from the media, the press and writers.

I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'

You don't want to be nasty for the sake of being nasty.

The success of 'The Simpsons' really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn't necessarily have to be working in kids' television.

I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.

I did a lot of theater when I was in high school and college. I also did stand-up in college, so it was always part of what I did.

I don't smoke much pot anymore.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

You would not want me on your football team.

I tend to lean more towards the Westerns of the 40s and 50s as opposed to the 60s and 70s. They get a little too drab for me when you get into the Spaghetti Western era. I love the John Ford movies. I love the music. I love the scope.

The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.

Adults acting like children and children acting like adults is generally a pretty reliable comic device.

On a certain day, I will tweet five times, and then I'll go four days without tweeting at all. It really depends on what time allows. Twitter, priority-wise, has to come after the work is done.

[With R-rated movie] you're not dealing with the restrictions imposed by the FCC. They're self-imposed. In a way, that does make it harder. You actually have to think about it, as opposed to just taking for granted that you're not going to be able to do this.

I was a film major with a concentration in animation.

I'm sure there are close calls that we're not even aware of hundreds of times a year. You cross the street, and if you'd crossed the street two minutes later, you'd have been hit by a car, but you'd never know it. I'm sure that kind of stuff happens all the time.

My dad always played Anne Murray in the car on the way to the dump when I was a kid.

I had - I was pretty hell bent on getting into the cartoon business specifically as an artist from the get-go.

I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera.

The worst thing to happen at the Oscars would be if nothing happened. You want something unscripted, something to riff on, something kinda out there.

I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.

There have to be people who are vocal about the advancement of knowledge over faith.

I'm the guy in the crowd making fun of the hero's shirt.

What makes me happy is just keeping my brain challenged and stimulated and on its toes.

The trend today is vampires, zombies, angels, all the stuff that puts me right to sleep. It's too bad because it's so much less interesting than the diversity of stories you can tell with science.

I still do a lot of drawing on a daily basis.

I hate people who say 'Just to play devil's advocate.'

If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it's just going to be that much funnier. And there's no better example of that than 'Monty Python.'

There are things about the single lifestyle that are very appealing.

Every year, the Friday before the new Saturday-morning shows would premiere, the networks would do this big preview special, and I was always glued to the TV. As horrible as they were, they were entertaining at the time. There was a lot of showmanship from the networks based around the new lineup.

I'm bad at golf.