Top 33 Alan Ball Quotes

I really feel like my goal, and I don’t always achieve it, is to do the best work I can do, and stay out of the results. Because ultimately, the result is not what the work is about. There are other people whose jobs are to focus on those results and maximize them, and that’s great. Let them do their job.

Somebody asked me, ‘Why do people like vampires so much?’ This was right after Obama had been elected and I said, ‘Because we just spent eight years being sucked dry by one.’

I know a lot of shows are like, ‘Here’s the pages,’ right before they start filming. I’d have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don’t have as strong a backbone as those other show writers.

If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.

Death showed up in my life very early on, so I’m aware of it. If you look at most of the things I write there’s a sort of contemplation of mortality – although ‘True Blood’ doesn’t fall into that. Even though there’s such a ridiculously high body count!

‘True Blood’ differs from ‘Six Feet Under’ in that there are way more characters and plot-lines, but fundamentally it’s still about the characters and their emotions.

I’m not like J.K. Rowling, where I know there’s going to be this number of seasons, and I know exactly what’s going to happen. I would be so bored if that was the case. There would be no journey. There would be nothing to discover.

It’s hard for me to get interested in stories that ignore death, which is what American marketing culture would like to do: pretend that death doesn’t exist, that you can buy immortality; just buy these products, and you’ll be forever young and happy.

I’d seen ‘Interview with A Vampire’ and saw Dracula movies growing up, but I never thought, ‘I love vampires; I have to do a show about vampires.’

I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it’s always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think.

There are times when I am directing, and there are a couple of moments I didn’t get the way I wanted, but I know I still have other angles to shoot and I have to be done by noon; I move on.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it’s horrifying. But that’s just human nature.

I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character’s sexuality is fascinating. It’s a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it’s such a personal thing.

I’m used to American actors who have a movie career thinking television acting is beneath them.

Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it.

A lot of times, the choice of the right song will save a scene. Or there will be a scene that’s a little flat and you put in the right song and somehow it just comes alive.

I’m a huge freak, and always have been. I spent the first part of my life trying really desperately not to be one, and it was just a waste of time.

I’m 53. I don’t care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

I guess in America we’re so sold on this ideal of the perfect, well-adjusted family that is able to confront any conflict and, with true love and understanding, work things through. I’m sure they do exist, but I never knew any of them.

My own belief is that people can come back from anything. It doesn’t mean that it won’t come at a huge cost.

I don’t really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people’s consciousness. But I do know they’re tremendously powerful. I mean, there’s a vampire on ‘Sesame Street.’ And Count Chocula. I don’t know why it’s so powerful.

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don’t want to die. It’s like, ‘Well, too bad, we do.’

As a writer, it’s fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it’s a really great job, but that’s what it is – a job.

I always choose to look, as much as one can, at the supernatural not being something that exists outside of nature, but a deeper, fundamental heart of nature that perhaps humans… have lost touch with. It’s a more primal thing than perhaps we are attuned to in our modern, self-aware way of life.

I’m a Buddhist, so one of my biggest beliefs is, ‘Everything changes, don’t take it personally.’

Life is infinitely complex, and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work.

Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s not necessarily a terrible thing.

I believe forgiveness is possible for everybody, for everything, but I’m a Buddhist.

I am so spoiled. I cannot watch a show where it gets interrupted for ads. I have to TiVo it and skip through the ads, because the culture of advertising is so false and phony that I just… ugh, you know?

I love to direct! I get really jazzed by directing, but directing is not the same kind of personal expression, the same kind of personal intimate expression that writing is. Because when you’re directing, you’re basically managing, basically getting out of people doing their job, except when you see them going astray.

I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms.

You know, I’m gay and I grew up being aware of that at a very early age, in a fairly repressed family.

I would say try to tell stories that you care about as opposed to stories that you think will sell.