Steven Bochco Quotes

“Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.”

— Steven Bochco

“I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.”

— Steven Bochco

I tend not to spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. If you say, 'Oh, I did 'Hill Street Blues' or 'L.A. Law' and everything I do has to measure up to some preconceived notion of that,' it would paralyze you.

— Steven Bochco

“'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.”

— Steven Bochco

“The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.”

— Steven Bochco

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

— Steven Bochco

“Imagery is like music.”

— Steven Bochco

“Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.”

— Steven Bochco

“Privately, we always called 'Hill Street' 'Cop Soap.'”

— Steven Bochco

“You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.”

— Steven Bochco

“The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.”

— Steven Bochco

“Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.”

— Steven Bochco

“Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.”

— Steven Bochco

“Cop shows are by definition melodramatic; they're larger than life. They create very stark contrasts and conflicts emotionally. They're provocative, assuming they grapple with - to the extent that cop shows are mirrors of the culture.”

— Steven Bochco

“Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.”

— Steven Bochco

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

— Steven Bochco

“Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.”

— Steven Bochco

“I remember practically every joke I've ever heard in my life.”

— Steven Bochco

“One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.”

— Steven Bochco

I'd always thought that 'NYPD Blue' really would open those doors. While I think it created a much broader template for cable, I don't think it really did that much for network television.

— Steven Bochco

“When you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat and all these twentysomething billionaires, it's really kind of fascinating; a classic tale of the haves and have-nots.”

— Steven Bochco

“When all of your decisions are based on economics, you end up with a sameness of vision. You're not taking the risks, you're not exploiting the passions of your creators. You're manufacturing product for a huge vending machine.”

— Steven Bochco

“The thing that has always interested me in the kinds of shows that I do have more to do with the consequences of behavior than the behavior itself. Pulling a trigger and shooting somebody, or dismembering somebody.”

— Steven Bochco

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

— Steven Bochco