A Quote by Alan Ball

I know a lot of shows are like, 'Here's the pages,' right before they start filming. I'd have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don't have as strong a backbone as those other show writers.
I've worked on other shows where the sense is like, "Well, don't change it too much," you know? But on this one [ Too Much Tuna], Nick [Kroll] and John [Mulaney] - beyond being amazing performers - are also writers, and wanted to keep improving upon the show, particularly the play within a play. I think the writing just got funnier and funnier.
I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.
When I'm filming, I try to get a facial two weeks before I start shooting and then again once I've wrapped. On set they tend to use a lot of make-up, so I like to prepare my skin right before, and then unclog all my pores right after.
To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.
The hardest thing to write was explaining what anxiety feels like. Every time I'd try to really write about what it feels like to have an anxiety attack, I would actually have an anxiety attack. It was good material but so incredibly uncomfortable.
The writers have slowly taken the show, with subjects other gay shows have dived right into, slowly. It was over a year before Will even started to date.
When you're tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers, so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.
When you're tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die. I've got to be in The Guinness Book of World Records for having the most heart attacks on television.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
I watch way too much television and like a lot of shows, so I'm always excited to meet those people and hope they're not douchey.
I mean, I am a little different from the band in that I, I'm pretty much an isolated writer. I don't associate myself with a lot of other writers, unless like, I'll write someone like a fan letter, and we start talking from then on, or like a songwriter that I like, you know.
I know a lot of writers who tell me they 'always' knew how to read. They can't remember a time before reading. And those writers make me want to tear my hair out.
I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.
I would want to know if, at 15, if my daughter loves me the way she does right now. And if she's proud of me, just because I want to be a good example for her, and seeing her grow and how much she loves Daddy saying 'Daddy, te quiero mucho,' which means 'I like you a lot,' those are the things that melt my heart.
Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.
I had a heart issue, and a lot of it was caused by stress and anxiety. I know that my father had really high anxiety too.
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