Howard Gordon Quotations

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

Where I came from, no one was a writer.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

(We) felt like we'd told David Palmer's story, we knew that there was no place more to take him. So it was a convenient way to sort of jump-start the year.

We had been circling another story line for the first two or three weeks we got together, and it didn't really excite us. Then somebody said, 'What if the president is shot?' It really was one of those epiphanies that suddenly crystallized.

She's coming back. We can't tell you how. We can't tell you for how long. We can't tell you how it ends. But, other than that, we can tell you anything.

One of the gifts the actors who do the show have is to make ridiculous situations feel real. We acknowledge when we're writing it or doing it that some things are unlikely, but it's the show and Jack Bauer doesn't work at a carwash.

I can tell you that this year, we've actually decided to go smaller with the story line as compared to last season. We'll see a collision between Jack's former self and his current self. And he'll be at the center of the action as opposed to on the outside looking in as he has the past few seasons.

He was able to cite chapter and verse from the seasons.

I think Carlos' recovery is probably as realistic as getting from Century City to the Ontario Airport in seven minutes.

Part of what gives the show its energy is we paint ourselves into corners and blast our way out.

I wish that were the case. It's not true. But I think on some unconscious level, maybe we know more than we think we know.

We had kind of painted ourselves into a corner.

Yeah. She's out in the woods with a cougar.

We're lucky, at the beginning of the year, if we know where it starts. It really has become more and more of an improvisation. I think that's part of what gives the show its energy. We paint ourselves into corners and blast our way out of those corners.

We flirted with going to London last year for six episodes. Not with Kiefer necessarily, but to tell another story in another part of the globe. That's something that I would really love to try to do next year.

We feel lucky to be working with so many great actors. Each of these newcomers, as well as the previously announced cast additions, will help deliver the thrill ride '24' fans have come to expect.

At this point, having done it for as long as we've done it, there's a certain amount of faith you have in the process that we're going to do it.

Sometimes bureaucracies are incompetent, just by virtue of the fact that they're bureaucracies. And, sometimes, Jack has to do things outside the law.

Then the idea of this fake death came out very late in the game and we rewrote it.

The big question everybody has about Martha is whether she's Chicken Little or the boy who cried wolf. There's a heavy burden in being married to a powerful man, particularly when you're not up for the role.

I'm not kidding you when I tell you we don't know what's going to happen next episode. I really mean it.

I mean, we know in general we'll avert a terrorist threat or conclude the conventional story, but we begin the year sort of pretending we have the first four to six (episodes). But even as we're writing those, they change. And I think one of the reasons the show has the quality it does . . . is we're so critical and so we revise ourselves. We revise it again. And in that process things just change too quickly to plan ahead too much.

I hope people will understand, I hope they'll be affected by the loss and I hope they'll miss him. Because if they do, we'll have all done our jobs.

Doing good stuff or stuff that you are proud of takes time and takes effort.

We're not allowed to carry out harsh interrogations anymore, but we're allowed to fly over somebody's village, without due process, and kill them all?

I feel like a centrist, an issue-specific person. I'm pretty conservative fiscally and pretty liberal on social issues.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

I have a ways to go as a novelist. But what's great is, well, I frankly enjoyed the solitude. And I enjoyed being able to tell characters what to say and do without negotiating with an actor.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

I'm one of three brothers.

I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers.

Listening takes practice, and it takes patience. But I promise, if you listen, your story will be better for it.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

Her lips were like the soft beauty of a delicately designed silken scarf.