Top 105 Joss Whedon Quotes

I always was an early-morning or late-night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning, you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

It’s not any huge secret that I’m an atheist.

Soon, I will be ‘King of all Hollywoodland.’

I was raised by a hardcore feminist.

I didn’t study writing. I didn’t write anything substantial until I got to California.

Something like ‘Much Ado’ happens, and even ‘Avengers’ happens because of the years of building connections and doing the work and proving yourself.

If somebody comes up to me, it’s because they’re moved by something I’m moved by. I’ve never taken a job I didn’t love… So when somebody’s coming up to me, or they’re writing, they’re in the same space I am in.

You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up. The fun is not that much different from doing a television show: You’re stuck with a certain set of rules, and then, rather than trying to break them, it’s just trying to peel away and see what’s underneath them. That to me is really fun.

I always want to make sure I’m telling a story about people that I care about.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you’ve actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

I think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

I’m a very gentle man, not unlike Gandhi.

Oddly enough, I never studied writing. I studied almost everything except writing.

You learn something every time you make a mistake.

There are two things that interest me – and they’re both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.

I’m very much more interested in the created family than I am in actual families.

I don’t tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don’t, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

You can’t be a storyteller and a speechwriter at the same time.

I always watch what I say. I am what I say.

There’s not going to be a ‘Buffy’ season nine on television.

Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores.

I’m a science fiction geek from birth – that’s just who I am.

The master plan does not have a master plan. Television ultimately finds itself, and after it finds itself, it finds itself changing.

I’m a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.

I respect the rules of TV, the rules of keeping things commercial and interesting and pop-y and fun.

I never wanted to take a job because I needed money, and I never have.

I don’t think I’m a celebrity. Maybe I’m a cult figure?

I’ll always protect what I’m working on. Which is why more and more of it is stuff only I can ruin.

I love all genres. The only thing I get stymied by is the Family Drama. I don’t necessarily know how to approach that.

I was very proud of my father, and I admired him, but I always thought he was more interesting than the shows he was working on.

I spent a ton of time alone. I was raised by a feminist; I had a terrifying father and oppressively scary and mean brothers. We had a farm. The rule was between breakfast and lunch you weren’t allowed to make a sound.

People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in ‘Firefly?’ Because I don’t know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

Making ‘The Avengers’ was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous. I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera, which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.

It’s only recently women got to be action heroes on TV. Progress is slow, and often non-existent. There’s plenty of cool comics with female characters… But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.

An audience who watches my shows knows who I am, knows that right when they think I’m going to make a joke, I’m going to blow something up, or during the worst peril, I’m going to have someone give someone a kiss – it’s just going to happen.

Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.

The fact is some people really love my work, some people not so much, but at the end of the day, I don’t want anybody coming out of the movie thinking about me.

Writers are completely out of touch with reality.

I am a fan of sequels even though they are inevitably awful.

Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.

If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It’s like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention.

The people who feel the most strongly about something will turn on you the most vociferously if they feel you’ve let them down.

What I do like is hiking. And that’s what filmmaking is. It’s a hike. It’s challenging and exhausting, and you don’t know what the terrain is going to be or necessarily even which direction you’re going in… but it sure is beautiful.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I’ve already figured out what it is I’m trying to do.

Running a TV show is always running a TV show; it’s never not running a TV show.

I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end, I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can’t just build off the first one or play variations.

My deal with Marvel is I have a consulting deal with them as well as a contract to make ‘Avengers.’ That means I’ll read all the scripts, I’ll look at cuts.

You know, the thing that I do to waste time is think of things I want to make. That’s how my mind is employed.

My absolute favorite part of Comic-Con is seeing, like, a ‘Mass Effect’ guy hanging out with a ‘Sailor Moon,’ and they’re just having a great time.

I loved working with ‘The Avengers’ cast and we had a great time, but it was a job, and they had other commitments during that job, so they would go off and do other things.

TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people’s lives; it’s like a marriage.

I don’t like uncertainty. I don’t play poker. I don’t like bluffing.

I hate it when people talk about Buffy as being campy… I hate camp, I don’t enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.

I’m never interested in movies where you don’t care about the people you’re watching, and that’s my biggest quibble about horror, that kids have gotten stupider and stupider.

Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.

What ‘Scream’ was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.

There’s a reason Tony Stark makes fun of ‘Thor,’ and mentions ‘Shakespeare’ in the park in ‘The Avengers.’ It’s great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story.

When you’re making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life.

‘The Sixth Sense’ is fine the second time around, but honestly, the first time around, it’s dazzling.

Wonder Woman isn’t Spider-man or Batman. She doesn’t have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise.

Casting is storytelling.

I do have screenplays I’ve written that never saw the light of day, but I don’t usually go back to them. When I’ve told a story, I want to tell another story.

I eat ‘The Walking Dead’ like its made of brains. Can’t even watch the show, I love the book so much.

I don’t write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don’t have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it’s bent doesn’t actually register. It’s the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

I had older brothers, and I don’t think there’s anything worse than an older brother. They pretty much told me the end of everything they got to see before I did.

I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up.

Why anybody gets my sense of humor I never know, but I do know that when they do, I keep them as close as I possibly can.

I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, ‘That’s absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.’

I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.