Vince Gilligan

“'SpongeBob SquarePants' is a great show, and it centers on a character that is courageously nice. Why is SpongeBob interesting? It's because he has passion. He has a passion for chasing jellyfish.”

“The thing that intrigued me about 'Breaking Bad' from day one was the idea of taking a character and transforming him.”

“I never thought anyone would come up to me and say, 'I like 'Better Call Saul' better than 'Breaking Bad.'' If you had asked me before we started, 'Would that bother you if someone said that?' First of all, I would have said, 'That's never gonna happen. And yeah, it probably would bother me.' It doesn't bother me a bit. It tickles me. I love it.”

“Theater is a wonderful medium - I love theater myself, and there are exceptions to every rule - but the thing that motion pictures can do that theater cannot is that in movies, you don't have to rely on dialogue.”

“We all put on faces, as Walter White does. We put on faces when we meet our friends, when we meet new people, when we present ourselves in interviews. We try to be who the people we meet want us to be, or who we want to truly be.”

“Our rational, realistic goals for 'Better Call Saul' were simply that it wouldn't suck, and it wouldn't embarrass us. It didn't rise much higher than that, to be honest.”

“How do you find a better actor than Michael McKean? How do you find someone who's just that good? They don't grow on trees. Plus, he's a pleasure to work with, pleasure to be around.”

“The very design of 'Breaking Bad' was that it was a finite, close-ended series.”

“Sometimes confidence can lead you to accept the first decent idea instead of to really strive to even discard that and go for the ultimate great idea. So in a weird way, I think confidence is overrated sometimes.”

“A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.”

“There's nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer.”

“I'm not big into spoilers. Just personally, I don't want anything spoiled.”

“If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.”

“'Breaking Bad'... the beauty of it is, some people are always going to love 'Breaking Bad' more. But I run into people every day now who say 'Better Call Saul' is their favorite of the two. I love hearing that. I don't know where I fall personally on that scale, that continuum - I try not to choose.”

“People want what they want, for as long as they want it, then tastes change and something else works.”

“You don't make a movie by yourself; you certainly don't make a TV show by yourself. You invest people in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.”

“A big part of the job of being a showrunner is, in my way of thinking, being a good communicator because there's really no other way to have hope for getting what you want, at the end of the day.”

“For many decades - and this was reinforced by the broadcast networks' standards-and-practices department - bad guys on TV had to get their comeuppance, and good guys had to be brave and true and unconflicted. Those were the laws of the business.”

“My brain- the older I get, it holds even less. There's not the capacity I would wish there to be.”

“I do see the world in pretty dark terms. I find it colder and scarier the older I get.”