On one level, I must never lose touch with my audience. But I must, at some point, stop trying to get everybody to like me, and be true to the thing I think I need to say.
For me, the act of telling the story and showing it to somebody is almost gravy.
What I love most about icons is finding out what’s behind them, exploring the price of their power.
Every time you work on a project, it’s a little vacation from the project you’re working on the other 23 hours. That’s the thing – it replenishes you to do something else.
Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women.
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s made some really good choices. She’s had some bad breaks. She goes with the independent, interesting young filmmakers and then they get slammed, like ‘Southland Tales.’ I’m proud of what she’s trying to do. It’s hard.
Every kid who hated grownups becomes a grownup. Well, except the ones who died.
I think to an extent every human being needs to be redeemed somewhat or at least needs to look at themselves and say, ‘I’ve made mistakes, I’m off course, I need to change.’ Which is probably the hardest thing for a human being to do, and maybe that’s why it interests me so.
My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.
Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.
I never write anything without humor, just because I like humor, but at the same time, it is a way for anything fantastical to become relatable.
I can do web, comic books, macrame, art.
I always tend to think just left of center, to remove myself from the world by one step. It is very freeing, and it’s a particular way of coming at stories and looking at them that I find the most beautiful stuff that I know comes from, ultimately.
Limitations are something that I latch onto – like working in genre, or if you’re writing TV, there are act breaks, there’s a length of time it’s supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it’s very hard to make things feel real and lived in.
I am not a fan of referencing your own work when it’s in a different universe than what you’re doing. That, to me, is a wink at the audience, and winking isn’t actually cool when you’re not, like, 10.
I kept telling my mom that reading comic books would pay off.
I don’t understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of ‘women are inferior.’
I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it… 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.
Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you’re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don’t bother to read.
The networks have a particular agenda, a particular model and structure. It doesn’t have anything to do with content. This is not a dis on them – they are a business model, run by business people.
I don’t have a ton of enemies. I get along with people pretty well when I’m not annoying them to death.
I don’t have a particular ambition in any medium. I just want to keep telling stories. If somebody pays me, also good.
I didn’t watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies – movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I’d like every movie I saw.
I would love to give you a more in-depth coherent explanation of my view of the soul, and if I had one I would. The soul and my concept of it are as ephemeral as anybody’s, and possibly more so.
I’ve been doing Shakespeare readings with my friends for years.
I never give up on anything, because you come back around, and suddenly the thing you thought you’d never do is relevant.
When I was a kid, maybe 11, I remember saying, ‘When I grow up I wanna have enough money to buy a really cool car, because I won’t.’
You don’t buy a Picasso because you love the frame.
‘Buffy’ is about growing up. ‘Angel’ is really about already having grown up, dealing with what you’ve done, and redemption.
Remember to always be yourself.
I love a good romantic comedy.
I think it’s not inaccurate to say that I had a perfectly happy childhood during which I was very unhappy.
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it.
The two things that matter the most to me: emotional resonance and rocket launchers. Party of Five, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers.
My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.
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