Quotes from Vince Gilligan

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.

'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.

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

'Better Call Saul' gets surprisingly dark.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.