The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?'

One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I’ve been on the other end of that.

When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it’s really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.

There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o’clock on a network.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don’t know how many years you’re going to be blessed with.

You name the TV psychic – they’re con men.

You can’t be someone you’re not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can’t hide.

I think when people talk about lighter drama, they tend to use that term, not derogatorily, but ‘lighter’ means sort of less to a degree, but if you’re an actor, light drama is often mistaken for easier drama.

When I’ve had hard times in my life, the one thing about being in TV is that it’s positive. I withdrew to ‘Cheers,’ it was familiar in that it was family. It had a kind of realistic positiveness to it.

You always think, no matter how many times you fail, that the next time you will succeed. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep trying.