Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by Howard Gordon

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

I have a ways to go as a novelist. But what's great is, well, I frankly enjoyed the solitude. And I enjoyed being able to tell characters what to say and do without negotiating with an actor.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

Where I came from, no one was a writer.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

Her lips were like the soft beauty of a delicately designed silken scarf.

Doing good stuff or stuff that you are proud of takes time and takes effort.

I'm one of three brothers.

I feel like a centrist, an issue-specific person. I'm pretty conservative fiscally and pretty liberal on social issues.

When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.

Listening takes practice, and it takes patience. But I promise, if you listen, your story will be better for it.

We're not allowed to carry out harsh interrogations anymore, but we're allowed to fly over somebody's village, without due process, and kill them all?