Brian Koppelman

So I've trained myself to do it, you know?

Well, you got to define real, dude.

Well, my origin story with the writing thing is I was a blocked writer, and it was so painful for me.

Our first child was born.

I had a good job, but I was sitting in my office with a stack of demo tapes to listen to.

I'd never smoked a cigarette in my life.

I was 29.

I'd started smoking cigarettes.

I was eating a double cheeseburger.

I don't want to listen to these tapes.

And it was a real moment of crisis.

I had this thought that if I was letting this creative impulse in me die, and like any other death, it would have toxicity.

And then that toxicity would ooze out of me onto the people I loved.

And I'd be a bad dad.

If I let myself get bitter, not a bad dad, if I let myself get bitter and let this sort of

creative impulse die, I felt like I just wouldn't be as good a father as I could be or a husband.

I felt like that bitterness would find a way to fucking ooze around, you know?

But I couldn't, I was the kind of, not the kind of person, I was a person who could write a paragraph or two or a page that I knew could affect people.

Like I knew I had a

The word talent is a weird word, but I knew I had an ability, a skill with words on a page that was fairly rare, but I couldn't write more than a page.