Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.
I can say with pride verging on smugness that I’ve got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.
I don’t want to think that the stories are finite; I want to feel that they can go on forever.
I hope I won’t become hated by geeks everywhere, but I don’t really know comic books all that well.
Well we’ve moved through the funfair a bit – we’ve done the rollercoaster, now we’re on the ghost train.
Never knowingly be serious. Rule 27.
The Doctor: I’ve seen bigger. Clara: Really? The Doctor: Are you joking? It’s massive!
I don’t know. I can’t tell the future I just work there.
I’d forgotten not all victories are about saving the universe.
Young Reinette: Monsieur, be careful! The Doctor: It’s just a nightmare, Reinette, don’t worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares! Young Reinette: What do monsters have nightmares about? The Doctor: Me!
Don’t play games with me! You just killed someone I like, that is not a safe place to stand! I’m the Doctor, and you’re in the biggest library in the Universe. Look me up.
What’s the point of being a grown-up if you don’t get to be immature?
You should always waste time when you don’t have any. Time is not the boss of you. Rule 408.
Madame Kovarian: The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules. The Doctor: Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.
People don’t really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.
The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it’s the enemy of comedy. It’s the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.
My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare’s day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it.
Witty and mean is easy – but fond and funny is hard.
When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.