Top 55 Quotes & Sayings by Vince Gilligan

The thing that intrigued me about 'Breaking Bad' from day one was the idea of taking a character and transforming him.

People want what they want, for as long as they want it, then tastes change and something else works.

Theater is a wonderful medium - I love theater myself, and there are exceptions to every rule - but the thing that motion pictures can do that theater cannot is that in movies, you don't have to rely on dialogue.

For many decades - and this was reinforced by the broadcast networks' standards-and-practices department - bad guys on TV had to get their comeuppance, and good guys had to be brave and true and unconflicted. Those were the laws of the business.

'Better Call Saul' gets surprisingly dark.

The older I get, the more nervous and anxiety-ridden I get. I don't know how to fix that.

I do see the world in pretty dark terms. I find it colder and scarier the older I get.

We shot 'Breaking Bad' on film; we capture 'Better Call Saul' digitally. In the shooting of 'Breaking Bad,' we would have this steady, handheld, cinema verite sort of look, so we purposely went the opposite way with 'Better Call Saul' - locked in the cameras and made the movements smoother and more mechanical.

I was always the kid who wanted Christmas to not come, because I realized at a pretty early age that no matter what you got, there's always a little bit of a letdown. It's like, 'Oh, gee, I wanted two ponies, not one.'

My brain- the older I get, it holds even less. There's not the capacity I would wish there to be.

I'm not big into spoilers. Just personally, I don't want anything spoiled.

Finding yourself on a show that's appreciated by its intended audience is a very rare and lucky thing, so when you win the lottery like that, you don't want to rush its conclusion; you want to keep it going as long as you can.

'SpongeBob SquarePants' is a great show, and it centers on a character that is courageously nice. Why is SpongeBob interesting? It's because he has passion. He has a passion for chasing jellyfish.

The sad truth is, there's more Walter White in me than I'd care to admit, because if I truly was as kind as people think I am, I wouldn't be able to write Walter White.

We all put on faces, as Walter White does. We put on faces when we meet our friends, when we meet new people, when we present ourselves in interviews. We try to be who the people we meet want us to be, or who we want to truly be.

I think one of the reasons for the success of 'Breaking Bad,' and now for 'Better Call Saul,' is that we have been blessed by AMC and Sony with enough time to figure things out.

You don't make a movie by yourself; you certainly don't make a TV show by yourself. You invest people in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.

There's nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer.

'Breaking Bad'... the beauty of it is, some people are always going to love 'Breaking Bad' more. But I run into people every day now who say 'Better Call Saul' is their favorite of the two. I love hearing that. I don't know where I fall personally on that scale, that continuum - I try not to choose.

There are two ways of knowing if something ends badly: If you're honest with yourself, you just kind of know it. And then there's other people's reaction to it.

If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.

It's amazing, the quality of good work that happened in the fifties when a series would have to turn out 30-some episodes a season - it's amazing that 'I Love Lucy' was as good as it was!

You can cheat in solitaire, but there's nothing satisfying about cheating in solitaire.

I'm very glad people love 'Breaking Bad,' but the harder character to write is the good character that's as interesting and as engaging as the bad guy.

How do you find a better actor than Michael McKean? How do you find someone who's just that good? They don't grow on trees. Plus, he's a pleasure to work with, pleasure to be around.

Sometimes when you're creating something, it takes on a life of its own, and you can be surprised at how sad or dramatic it might get.

The very design of 'Breaking Bad' was that it was a finite, close-ended series.

TV is designed to keep characters in place for years on end. The best example is 'M*A*S*H:' You have a three-year police action in Korea, and they stretched that out to eleven seasons. It was a great show, but when you think about it, a weird unreality overtakes a television series. You see the actors age, and yet the characters don't.

Our rational, realistic goals for 'Better Call Saul' were simply that it wouldn't suck, and it wouldn't embarrass us. It didn't rise much higher than that, to be honest.

A big part of the job of being a showrunner is, in my way of thinking, being a good communicator because there's really no other way to have hope for getting what you want, at the end of the day.

I never thought anyone would come up to me and say, 'I like 'Better Call Saul' better than 'Breaking Bad.'' If you had asked me before we started, 'Would that bother you if someone said that?' First of all, I would have said, 'That's never gonna happen. And yeah, it probably would bother me.' It doesn't bother me a bit. It tickles me. I love it.

Sometimes confidence can lead you to accept the first decent idea instead of to really strive to even discard that and go for the ultimate great idea. So in a weird way, I think confidence is overrated sometimes.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

It's like that old expression: "Men plan and god laughs." You sort of see that in the television world, where you have an idea where things are heading and you have a plan and sort of start off in that general direction, but you wind up taking all these side paths and whatnot - if you're lucky.

I think that for me, as far as audience expectations and how you manage your anxiety, it helps to keep things in perspective.

I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.

It's weird how with a TV show, you don't have just the one ending - you have the many.

If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.'

Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.

I stay away from the internet as much as I can. Except for pornography.

Having certain limits - not too many, but certain limits on an ability to tell a story - makes us work harder, me and my writers. Sometimes I watch a giant movie with a $250 million budget and I think they feel kind of bloated, and that if they'd been leaner and meaner they might've had better storytelling.

I'm not a big internet guy - not because I'm not interested in what people have to say, but probably because I'm too interested.

Let the audience put 2 and 2 together so that it comes up with 4. Let them do that themselves, and they'll love you forever.

[Making meth] is a complex process. The truth of it is that we live in a post-Google world where you can find six recipes for meth in 30 seconds on a search engine.

I wanna keep being productive and creative.

What's so great about making television is that it's a collaborative beast. It's created by a great many hands belonging to a great many people.

I love cable, but not because you can show boobies and say the F-word. I love it because you have more time to think. That's the blessing of it.

If you’re too rigid in your thinking you may miss some wonderful opportunities for storytelling.

It's often the case with successful TV shows that they kind of inadvertently live on past their prime. It's best to leave the audience wanting more.

Whatever it takes to get you where you need to be, there's nothing wrong with the method acting or having to growl and bang your head in a corner and get into the moment and work yourself into a lather - if that's what it takes, so be it.

Endings are the hardest part. I find there's a great relief that at the end of every episode, every hour of TV you produce, while you want a proper and satisfying ending, it doesn't have to end The Story, in capital letters.

I've imparted that philosophy to the writers, but some of them look stuff up while some don't. Same with the editors, directors and actors. To each their own.

The last thing in the world that I would want to know, in my own life, is when I'm going to pass away.

In all honesty, I've written movies that have been made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.