I have a bad habit, in the shows that I run, of killing off the people that I love.

Kids aint supposed to be grateful! They're supposed to eat your food, break your heart.

It's hard asking someone with a broken heart to fall in love again.

I've had a lifelong obsession with urban legends and American folklore.

Television showrunners are a foolishly optimistic bunch.

Beyond all our Blackberries and iPhones, we're dangerously separated from our food and water supplies.

We are definitely living in the butterfly effect theory, where any change that is made in the past is going to have a very logical cause-and-effect ramification of the present.

I've always said at the beginning of every single season of the show when I was running the show in the writers' room, "This is the last season, so let's smoke 'em if we've got 'em."

When I am kicking around show ideas, or really any idea, usually an image comes to me. I don't really start with a character or a logline like, "What if the electricity turned off?"

Your half-caff double vanilla latte is getting cold over here, Francis.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

I've always been able to transform happiness and pain and sorrow and tears into positive energy.

Architecture is not so much a knowledge of form, but a form of knowledge.

I have to be perfectly honest: You should have an anniversary to acknowledge the way I work the ebonics.

Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a "national resource," and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories.

Love should be the silver thread that runs through all your conduct.

I don't have a problem with enthusiasm.

I don't have parts of my body that I hate or would like to trade for somebody else's or wish I could surgically adjust into some fantasy version of what they are.

I get a kick out of watching a team defense me. A player moves two steps in one direction and I hit it two steps the other way. It goes right Stan Musialby his glove and I laugh.

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

A big shot is a little shot who keeps on shootin'