Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Moriarty

Moriarty is doing something actors rarely get credit for: staking a claim on taste. The line reads like a defense of craft against the whole machinery of hype. “Anything well written” is deliberately expansive, almost anti-branding. He’s not pitching a genre, a politics, or a fashionable “voice.” He’s pitching standards: good language, clarity, honesty. Those are old-fashioned words, and that’s the point. In an industry that rewards mood, attitude, and packaging, he plants his flag in intelligibility and truthfulness.

The Shakespeare name-drop is less a boast than a provocation. Moriarty isn’t equating a TV script or stage play to Hamlet; he’s insisting they’re judged by the same underlying DNA: language that can carry thought, character that can hold contradiction, scenes that don’t cheat. Shakespeare becomes shorthand for a tradition where words aren’t decorative but structural. If the writing is strong, the performance has something to bite into; if it’s sloppy, actors are left manufacturing meaning in the gaps.

There’s subtext here about cultural drift. “Clarity” and “honesty” feel aimed at an era of winking irony, faux-edginess, and prestige murk. Moriarty’s ethic is almost democratic: great writing isn’t gated by budget, platform, or trend. It’s worth doing because it connects the working artist to a long line of language-driven storytelling, where the craft itself is the status.