48 Quotes by Michael Schur

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

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.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

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.

I hate this phrase, but it's a "can do" attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.

I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.

You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.