Top 30 Craig Mazin Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Craig Mazin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

What compelled me about the story of Chernobyl more tha

What compelled me about the story of Chernobyl more than anything else was something very universal. Yes, Chernobyl happened because in many ways, the Soviet system was deeply corrupt and evil, but the Soviet system did not arrive to us from some other planet. It was devised by humans.
Craig Mazin
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We’ve seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don’t like is now false.
Craig Mazin
We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It’s within ourselves as well here in the West.
Craig Mazin
‘Chernobyl’ is a human story. It’s not a disaster movie. It’s not about explosions. It’s about people and truths and lies.
Craig Mazin
There are the movies that should never be made and resist being made until, through sheer brute force, somebody finally makes it. And then, there are the movies you can’t stop from being made because they just want to be made.
Craig Mazin
I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I’ve been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn’t know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.
Craig Mazin
What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.
Craig Mazin
I try my best to live by the principle that if you’re going to be telling a story that you didn’t live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.
Craig Mazin
Of all the bad things Internet has done for us, one of the good things is exposing us to people that were our neighbors, and now we’re at happy to ask questions about things that we were otherwise willing to just walk by and not notice.
Craig Mazin
If you organize your life around some political party’s list of things you should believe, or an individual that you think is going to come and save you, you are disconnecting yourself from truth. And there is a price to pay.
Craig Mazin
‘Law & Order’ has the same plot every single episode.
Craig Mazin
When you look at the history of slavery in the United States, and you see the impact that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ had, culture sometimes is the only way that we can put people’s eyes on an emotional truth and make them feel why something has to change.
Craig Mazin
Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can’t quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.
Craig Mazin
When you’re writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you’re running out of pages.
Craig Mazin
As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That’s just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn’t exist; make them seem like they do.
Craig Mazin
Our culture reflects back what is true. It doesn’t always reflect it back reliably. It can distort things.
Craig Mazin
I really hate people that spoil stuff by putting scripts online. I don’t mind so much people that do movie spoilers when the movie is out in the theater. If you haven’t gotten there the first weekend, it’s on you to not read reviews or anything. But to put up screenplay reviews just kills me.
Craig Mazin
In the case of ‘Chernobyl,’ we’re telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies – and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.
Craig Mazin
Basically, the last 30 minutes of ‘Goodfellas,’ that was my neighborhood… literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that’s what I thought being an adult was.
Craig Mazin
I grew up on lovely Staten Island, which is the forgotten borough of New York City.
Craig Mazin
I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that’s required to be dumb in comedy.
Craig Mazin
If I don’t know who I’m writing for, I make it up and pick somebody I’m writing for. That’s really the only way to do it.
Craig Mazin
The strange rejection of the expert is mind boggling to me. When we’re told that the worst word in politics is ‘elite,’ I have to wonder whom else are we supposed to be rooting for if not the most qualified and smart and informed people?
Craig Mazin
I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do.
Craig Mazin
I’m a big believer in the old-school way of releasing television. It’s not to say that other platforms aren’t making great shows, but there’s something about just dumping it all down at once that I think, honestly, cheapens it a touch.
Craig Mazin
Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you’re writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.
Craig Mazin
Bottom line: nothing of note happened when I was a youngster, really. I went to Princeton, which is where I met my wife.
Craig Mazin
The planet is heating; the climate is changing. We know this. We have not just one scientist, or two, but thousands screaming this at us at the top of their lungs. And we have a government full of disinterested, stubborn people who are going to cling to their denial and their nonsense.
Craig Mazin
I’m a big believer in comedy writers. I’ve always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It’s extremely difficult, but I’ve always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.
Craig Mazin
Comedians who aren’t screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They’re expressing their own view of what they think funny is.
Craig Mazin