Quotes from Craig Mazin

Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.

There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!

There are the movies that should never be made and resist being made until, through sheer brute force, somebody finally makes it. And then, there are the movies you can't stop from being made because they just want to be made.

Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.

'Law & Order' has the same plot every single episode.

When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.

At some point, and maybe it's a function of age, you've had enough of it. You start to slide in other directions. A lot of comedy writers begin to turn the dial. With me, it was a switch. Comedy off. Drama on.

I really hate people that spoil stuff by putting scripts online. I don't mind so much people that do movie spoilers when the movie is out in the theater. If you haven't gotten there the first weekend, it's on you to not read reviews or anything. But to put up screenplay reviews just kills me.

Sometimes critics disagree with the audience, and that's fine. I make movies for the audience. I guess I hope that the critics like it, but on the other hand, I just really want the audience to like it.

When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.

In the case of 'Chernobyl,' we're telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies - and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.

Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.

Women are suspicious of this male ritual of the bachelor party and are suspicious of what men do and say when they are not being watched by them.

I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.

Our culture reflects back what is true. It doesn't always reflect it back reliably. It can distort things.

For me, I've been doing comedy for a long time, and I love it and have no regrets, but 'Chernobyl' expresses a side of me that is far more true to who I am on a day to day basis.

The strange rejection of the expert is mind boggling to me. When we're told that the worst word in politics is 'elite,' I have to wonder whom else are we supposed to be rooting for if not the most qualified and smart and informed people?

There's an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it's called 'Come and See.' Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.

I'm a big believer in the old-school way of releasing television. It's not to say that other platforms aren't making great shows, but there's something about just dumping it all down at once that I think, honestly, cheapens it a touch.

My personal belief is that there's not much value in showing things from the past that have no relevance to today or failing to connect some kind of dotted line to where we are today, because otherwise, it just becomes homework.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do.

In my opinion, where comedy sequels tend to go bad is that they get sillier and lighter.

I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.