Top 46 Quotes & Sayings by John Landgraf

As much as I very much want audiences to watch FX's carefully curated and highly contextualized television shows, I'm now glad when anyone takes the time to watch even our competition's television series, as long as it demands their sustained attention and challenges their knee-jerk perceptions.

You look at who's actually created shows for FX that have succeeded, and there are a lot of first-time showrunners - Ryan Murphy, Denis Leary, Louis C.K., the 'It's Always Sunny' creators, Kurt Sutter, Joe Weisberg, Pamela Adlon, Donald Glover.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

Who owns the future? This is the question at the heart of every stock market.

I'm not interested in world domination. I'm interested in running a nice little brand that takes care of its own and does really good work.

Television shows are not like cars or operating systems, and they are not best made by engineers or coders in the same assembly line manner as consumer products which need to be of uniform size, shape, and quality.

We are the only animal that tells stories.

Even good shows can fail to find an audience because they're drowned out by the noise and the sheer volume of everything that is being made. It's one of the downsides of there being, as I've argued, too many shows.

I hope that most of us believe that we actually would all benefit from living in a more equitable society. If that's not happening, we're squandering human potential.

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

I have respect for anyone who helps a creator put a great television show on the air.

You can't be in a certain business and not sell to Amazon or not sell to Wal-Mart. You have to reckon with them, because even though there are other buyers, they're the only buyers that matter.

I want the humans to be able to hold their own against the strength of the machines.

Was there ever anyone more ill-suited for being the showman of the year than me?

I think of myself as a shy, modest, relatively unassuming person.

I have a lot of faith in our showrunners.

I don't want artists to find themselves in a situation where there are only two buyers. That just doesn't seem like a good outcome.

All the world's combined knowledge is at our fingertips. But the same technology that makes this possible is robbing us of deeper insight.

You want your company to be a vehicle for many people to achieve their dreams.

I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if one company was able to seize a 40-50-60% share in storytelling. I don't think monopoly market shares are good for society, and I think they'd be particularly bad for society and storytellers if they were achieved in the storytelling genre.

We want to make the best television possible. We should be drawing on the entire available pool of storytellers and directors, and we should be expanding that pool and trying to hire the very, very, very best people. That's our job.

Two things happen when you're fearful. First, you make seemingly rational decisions that are actually hedges. Or second, you fail to do something because you worry about the consequences.

Silicon Valley has infinite access to capital and can lose money indefinitely.

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting. Even some of our best shows have had substantial re-shoots and reworking before they've gone on the air.

Perhaps storytellers don't need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn't it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don't bet on it.

As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.

I'm an Amazon Prime member. I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu, and they have great user interfaces and some excellent original programs. But what truly distinguishes all three of these services is the utility of their vast libraries of acquired content, which also is a part of what makes each a platform, even if it has a 'house brand,' too.

Reality television was in some ways being unimaginative at that time. We were excited about the possibilities of the form, to use real people as your stars, to not be about winning, to be about going on complicated, challenging, funny, dramatic journeys.

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.

Not ever having been an agent myself, my sense is that upper-level agents who have the most power, who can move people through the system more easily, are less willing to take on the volume of work to break somebody new. And then lower-level people, if they are willing to take on somebody new, they don't necessarily have as much sway, and it's harder for them to push somebody through.

If you think about how broadcast mini-series approach historical events, there is a hagiography. There has been a soft, very glossy idea about history. And one of the things I like about Game of Thrones, for example, is just the grit and the authenticity.

It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy.

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting.

I think maybe the most important thing that I or anybody at my company and any of my colleagues can do is establish a trusting, productive, collaborative relationship with creative people.

For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.

We also have a piece about the Mayflower, but it's just a very different, very gritty, very character-driven version of why those people were on that boat and what the experience was like for them, emotionally, physically and spiritually, and also the Native Americans and what the state of Native American society was at that time.

There are no characters in the limited series Fargo that are derived from the characters in the film Fargo. It's hard to describe how remarkably true to the film the show is.

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.

I think the possibility of continuing on a comedy is greater than a drama.

The amount of competition is just literally insane.

Well, equity matters. I hope that most of us believe that we actually would all benefit from living in a more equitable society. If that's not happening, we're squandering human potential. We want to make the best television possible. We should be drawing on the entire available pool of storytellers and directors, and we should be expanding that pool and trying to hire the very, very, very best people. That's our job.

It's easier to solve the problem more quickly with directors than with writers.

I don't think I ever had any relationship with any showrunner, over time, with whom I didn't have conflict.

It's not that writing staffs don't change at all, but they don't change very much. Directors are freelancers. There are directors who do five or 10 episodes of a show every year for years, but most directors are freelance, they come and go.

There is a privilege in American society to being male and being white, and I think it's hard for white males to understand that privilege, because we've never experienced the opposite. When I sought out mentors to try to move forward, there were white males in virtually every position from which I was seeking mentorship. There was a natural simpatico or natural comfort. And so if you believe that's true, and I believe it's true, then we have to change that. We have to try to equalize opportunity and privilege.

I think a shotgun or a handgun that has a six-round clip is a very good, perfectly adequate weapon for self-defense, in the home. You simply can't create that kind of mayhem, if you have to reload.