Quotes from Robert Ben Garant

If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.

L.A. is like an oil rig. It's not pretty. It's awful. The air is bad, the view is bad, the people are bad.

We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!

You'll be in the checkout line at the supermarket, and there will be one of our movies in between the Certs and 'The National Enquirer.' That's where some of ours end up.

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

My college years are a blur.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to.

I think our 'Reno' cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn't develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.

I think with any movie, directing is more in the preparation. You just have to prepare for everything that's going to happen.

If a movie has three decent scenes and a decent character, I think, 'OK, at least they got that guy right.'

When we first started to write our first movie, 'You Are Going To Prison,' we wanted it to be crazy and unique, brand new, our voice, not like anything that'd ever been before. It took us about a year to write our first script.

There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work, and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you, anyway.

Paul Rudd's a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on 'Friends,' and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.

'Balls of Fury' was my first time directing, and that's a movie that I think parts of it are great.

You can't teach somebody how to be a good writer.

You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.

I never really saw 'The Kids in the Hall' until after we started 'The State.'

Nobody mentioned this in any of the reviews, but the reason we came up with that plot for 'Reno 911: Miami' is because we thought it was just the stupidest title for a movie that we could think of.

'Reno 911: Miami!' is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews - good and mostly bad - nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that's more awkward.

'Balls of Fury' was a 45-day shoot when it probably - hindsight being 20/20 - probably should've been a 75-day shoot with all the ping-pong action.

We had a great run on 'Reno' - 87 episodes and a movie. Not too shabby.

In cop shows, the police don't get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all 'Reno' was, and I think that's all cops do 90 percent of their day.

'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'