Top 131 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Moffat

I absolutely love television, and I don't mean to be vulgar, but as I keep having to explain to people from the movie industry, I get more power and more money doing television, so why on earth would I do a film?

I can say with pride verging on smugness that I've got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.

Fascinatingly confident, rude people are great.

The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.

The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it's the enemy of comedy. It's the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

Being the only writer on a successful show is very rewarding.

Well, I'm permitted to say anything I like. I just don't.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious.

My priorities are where they should be, which is making really great, really exciting television.

If you don't expect to like someone and then you do, that's an incredibly exciting moment.

I don't want to think that the stories are finite; I want to feel that they can go on forever.

I can't see what's wrong about assuming intelligence in your audience and what's bad news about being rewarded for assuming that.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

If anyone said to me 'invent a new monster so we can sell more toys', I'd kick them out of my office.

The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it.

To me, a 'brand' sounds evil.

If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most men are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience.

When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.

You'll go out of business if you think people are stupid.

Nothing can ever be a rule in drama, because then you're saying certain things won't ever happen, and that would be very boring.

I don't think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I'll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

Brainy's the new sexy.

Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

I always tend to favor the newer idea.

I hope I won't become hated by geeks everywhere, but I don't really know comic books all that well.

It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezes are cool.

All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.

It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.

There's something really cool about scaring children. Traumatize a generation, that's what it's all about.

We're all stories, in the end.

What's the point of being a grown-up if you don't get to be immature?

I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.

Never run when you're scared. Rule 7.

You should always waste time when you don't have any. Time is not the boss of you. Rule 408.

Madness is just what a genius looks like to a tiny mind.

I find it's bizarre that science fiction is the one branch of television to push the idea of strong female characters. And I only call it bizarre because strong women aren't fiction.

Demons run when a good man goes to war. Night will fall and drown the sun when a good man goes to war. Friendship dies and true love lies. Night will fall and the dark will rise when a good man goes to war. Demons run but count the cost; the battle's won but the child is lost.

Never knowingly be serious. Rule 27.

The Doctor: 'You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, but you really think they're lying to make you feel better?' Amelia: 'Yeah...' The Doctor: 'Everything's going to be fine.

When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark.

Rule 1: The Doctor lies.

Never ignore a coincidence. Unless you're busy, in which case, always ignore a coincidence.

Though the man above might say hello, expect no love from the beast below

You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand! You say no! You have the guts to do what’s right, even when everyone else just runs away.

I like naked women! I'm a bloke! I'm supposed to like them! We're born like that. We like naked women as soon as we're pulled out of one... When Man invented fire, he didn't say "Hey, let's cook!" He said: "Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!"... The story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms.

An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.

See the bowtie? I wear it and I don't care. That's why it's cool.

You take this cold, remarkable, difficult, dangerous, borderline psychopath man, and you wonder what might have happened to him had he not met his best friend, a friend that no one would have put him with, this solid, dependable, brave, big-hearted war hero. I think people fall in love, not with Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson, but with their friendship. I think it is the most famous friendship in fiction, without a doubt.

We have a plan to top it. And I do think our plan is devastating. We’ve practically reduced our cast to tears telling them the plan … we’re probably more excited that we’ve ever been about Sherlock.

The story of Sherlock Holmes, on the surface, is about detection, but in reality, it's about the best of two men who save each other - a lost, washed-up war hero and a man who could end up committing murders instead of solving them. They come together. They become this perfect unit. They become the best friendship ever, and they become heroes. That's what we fall in love with, not Sherlock on his own. No one can love that man on his own, but Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson - the best friends ever.

Witty and mean is easy - but fond and funny is hard.