You never have to change a book for budget.
— Jonathan Tropper
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
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.
Nobody wants to rock their own life. But, on the other hand, when your life does get rocked, it affords you a certain level of emotional honesty. It liberates you to be who you really are.
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.
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.
There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.
I'm at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I'm not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?
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.
I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.
I have a handful of leather jackets, and I love them all. I think most men my age do, and it can be traced back to the Fonz and Danny Zuko.
I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.
Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.
Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.
I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.
There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.
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.
'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.
