“I feel that people are basically trying to do their best in the world. Even when you see people making mistakes, you understand why they're making a mistake. Everybody has flaws, everybody has demons, everybody has ghosts, but I think you watch people and you see everybody trying to do their best.”
“People think about autism as something with kids. Well, those kids grow up.”
“I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.”
“The frustrating thing about 'Friday Night Lights' is I know a lot more people would respond to the show if they saw it.”
“The shows I've been working on, especially 'Parenthood' and 'Friday Night Lights,' I think are completely character-driven stories. I think, for most writers, that's a privilege to be telling those kinds of stories. It's erroneous to me.”
“The most frustrating thing to me is when I tell people I work on 'Friday Night Lights,' they'll say, 'Oh, I hear that's a really good show.' They never watched it.”
“You're breaking up, you're getting together, you're changing your life, you're arguing with your parents, you're making terrible mistakes, you're having great triumphs. It's what happens to teenagers.”
“Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.”
“'Parenthood' has been the beneficiary of wonderful performances by child actors.”
“I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.”