Steven William Moffat OBE is a Scottish television writer and producer. He is best known for his work as showrunner, writer, and executive producer of two BBC One series: the science fiction television series Doctor Who and the contemporary crime drama television series Sherlock, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These Steven Moffat quotes will motivate you.
Best Steven Moffat Quotes
- “We have a plan to top it. And I do think our plan is devastating. We’ve practically reduced our cast to tears telling them the plan … we’re probably more excited that we’ve ever been about Sherlock.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “There’s something really cool about scaring children. Traumatize a generation, that’s what it’s all about.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand! You say no! You have the guts to do what’s right, even when everyone else just runs away.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Madness is just what a genius looks like to a tiny mind.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I like naked women! I’m a bloke! I’m supposed to like them! We’re born like that. We like naked women as soon as we’re pulled out of one… When Man invented fire, he didn’t say “Hey, let’s cook!” He said: “Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!”… The story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I can’t see what’s wrong about assuming intelligence in your audience and what’s bad news about being rewarded for assuming that.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I find it’s bizarre that science fiction is the one branch of television to push the idea of strong female characters. And I only call it bizarre because strong women aren’t fiction.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You should always waste time when you don’t have any. Time is not the boss of you. Rule 408.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“An awful lot of storytelling isn’t really about making people understand – it’s about making people care.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “What’s the point of being a grown-up if you don’t get to be immature?” ~ Steven Moffat
- “We’re all stories, in the end.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “If you don’t expect to like someone and then you do, that’s an incredibly exciting moment.” ~ Steven Moffat quotes
- “The story of Sherlock Holmes, on the surface, is about detection, but in reality, it’s about the best of two men who save each other – a lost, washed-up war hero and a man who could end up committing murders instead of solving them. They come together. They become this perfect unit. They become the best friendship ever, and they become heroes. That’s what we fall in love with, not Sherlock on his own. No one can love that man on his own, but Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – the best friends ever.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“See the bowtie? I wear it and I don’t care. That’s why it’s cool.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Never run when you’re scared. Rule 7.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “The Doctor: ‘You know when grown-ups tell you everything’s going to be fine, but you really think they’re lying to make you feel better?’ Amelia: ‘Yeah…’ The Doctor: ‘Everything’s going to be fine.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Never knowingly be serious. Rule 27.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “When man invented fire, he didn’t say, “Hey, let’s cook.” He said, “Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I’ll be a story in your head. But that’s OK. We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Witty and mean is easy – but fond and funny is hard.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “It’s a funny thing about stories. It doesn’t feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven’t got it yet, because somewhere out there, there’s that perfect thing — the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you’ve always been heading for, but never expected to go.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “It’s a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezes are cool.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You take this cold, remarkable, difficult, dangerous, borderline psychopath man, and you wonder what might have happened to him had he not met his best friend, a friend that no one would have put him with, this solid, dependable, brave, big-hearted war hero. I think people fall in love, not with Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson, but with their friendship. I think it is the most famous friendship in fiction, without a doubt.” ~ Steven Moffat quotes on friendship
- “Though the man above might say hello, expect no love from the beast below” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Rule 1: The Doctor lies.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Being the only writer on a successful show is very rewarding.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I can say with pride verging on smugness that I’ve got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Kathy Nightingale: What’s good about sad? Sally Sparrow: It’s happy for deep people.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you’ve got playing the leads.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I wouldn’t mind removing all the mistakes I have made. That would be exhausting and take forever. Honestly, it’s one of the spells of my life that has been the most perfect. Not because I did the job perfectly, because of course I did it very imperfectly, but because I enjoyed it so much. What would I change? I complain a lot. I whinge, I more or less communicate in levels of complaint so I wish sometimes I didn’t just spend all my time saying, ‘I’m working so hard, what do I get in return for this?’.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“You can be as beautiful and charming as you’d like, but if you’re not terrific at acting, it will mean nothing on the screen.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Never ignore a coincidence. Unless you’re busy, in which case, always ignore a coincidence.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Always take a banana to a party.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Nothing can ever be a rule in drama, because then you’re saying certain things won’t ever happen, and that would be very boring.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “[The Doctor, Capt. Jack and Rose are cornered by the empty children.] The Doctor: Go to your room! Go to your room! I mean it. I’m very, very angry with you. I’m very, very cross! GO! TO! YOUR! ROOM! [The children lurch away and obey him.] I’m really glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Hitler: Thank you, whoever you are. I think you just saved my life. The Doctor: Believe me… It was an accident.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!” ~ Steven Moffat
- “It’s a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful — and then you actually talk with them, and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick. But then there’s other people, and you meet them and you think: “Not bad, they’re okay,” and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality’s written all over it; and they just — and they turn into something so beautiful.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “There’s something that doesn’t make sense. Let’s go and poke it with a stick.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Fascinatingly confident, rude people are great.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Sherlock Holmes can be wise and funny. He wasn’t, at the beginning. But later on, he’s got a bantering relationship with loads of people. He’s got a wisdom that he didn’t have in the early stage. But he stays on the mountain top, and he will die up there. He’s not going to change that.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “There’s one thing you don’t put in a trap, if you’re smart, if you value your continued existance, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there is one thing you never ever put in a trap. And what would that be sir? Me” ~ Steven Moffat
- “We’re thrilled to have Maisie Williams joining us on Doctor Who. It’s not possible to say too much about who or what she’s playing, but she is going to challenge the Doctor in very unexpected ways. This time he might just be out of his depth, and we know Maisie is going to give him exactly the right sort of hell.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Come on, Rory! It isn’t rocket science, it’s just quantum physics! -The Doctor (Matt Smith)” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it’s the hardest. It’s the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There’s a big button marked ‘fail,’ and that’s when nobody laughs.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I write the kind of stuff I’d like to watch.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“I always tend to favor the newer idea.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married – we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile, women are out there hunting for husbands.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I like that Helen Mirren has been saying the next doctor should be a woman. I would like to go on record and say that the Queen should be played by a man!” ~ Steven Moffat
- “People don’t really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“Demons run when a good man goes to war.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. ‘Reducing women to mothers’ – now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I’ve heard.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “If anyone said to me ‘invent a new monster so we can sell more toys’, I’d kick them out of my office.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it.” ~ Steven Moffat
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“As we all know, it is the proper duty of every British subject to come to the aid of the TARDIS.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “Amy: “Can I come?” Doctor: “Not safe in here, not yet. Five minutes. Give me five minutes and I’ll be right back.” Amy: “People always say that.” Doctor: “Am I people?…Do I even look like people?…Trust me, I’m the Doctor.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “It’s the 50th year of Doctor Who and look what’s going on! We’re up in the sky and under the sea! We’re running round the rings of an alien world and then a haunted house. There’s new Cybermen, new Ice Warriors and a never before attempted journey to the centre of the TARDIS. And in the finale, the Doctor’s greatest secret will at last be revealed! If this wasn’t already our most exciting year it would be anyway!” ~ Steven Moffat
