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It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.

Michael Schur

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Michael Schur
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 29
Actor
Executive Producer
Screenwriter
Showrunner
Television Actor
Television Producer
Ann Arbor
Michigan
Ken Tremendous
Doesn
Imaginary
Character
Fit
Writing
Actor
Trying
Easier
Work
Actors
Much
Often
Experience
Write

More quotes by Michael Schur

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My favorite TV show of all time is 'The Wire,' which has the feeling of a project-based show. You draw in people from disparate parts of the world, and they have to work together to achieve a goal.
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I am not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I only use Twitter, which I wish I didn't.
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I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.
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People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.
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Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call pipe - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.
Michael Schur
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Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.
Michael Schur
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What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.
Michael Schur
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In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.
Michael Schur
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All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.
Michael Schur
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You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.
Michael Schur
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I think if you're too concerned with being cool or hip or liked, you can't really make good TV because sincerity and coolness are opposites.
Michael Schur
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I find Billy Eichner to be hilarious, though I also imagine that for many, a little goes a long way. Billy provides a kind of comedy the Parks and Recreations show did not have - an insane person screaming at everyone, and our job going forward, as it is with all of our characters, is to develop him and make him more three dimensional.
Michael Schur
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Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.
Michael Schur
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I hate this phrase, but it's a can do attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.
Michael Schur
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If the doors aren't open, just kick them in and keep walking.
Michael Schur
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I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, How much is this apple? that person would have an insane name.
Michael Schur
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You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.
Michael Schur
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As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'
Michael Schur