Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

You never have to change a book for budget.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.

Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.

I still enjoy the tactile sensation of holding a book. But when I need to read fast for work, I use the Kindle App on my iPad.

I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.

I'm at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I'm not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?

Sometimes it's heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they've become. Maybe that's why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.

At this point in my life, I'm not looking for any happy endings. I'm just looking to get things started.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.

She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.

I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe

We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.