Top 13 Winnie Holzman Quotes

The Huntington Theatre has a really fine reputation. I was keenly aware of how well thought of they are and that they develop and support new plays.

As a writer who has collaborated on projects, you give your life over to that project.

I do love the idea of people at a certain time in their lives when they’re questioning, figuring out who to be. I find that interesting, but honestly, I think it’s like that at every time in your life.

I care about actors, and I understand them in a very personal way. I’m not saying every writer has to do that, but in my case, it’s been helpful. I can put myself into the scene and think, ‘What would it be like to act this?’ Any writer who’s really good probably does that to some extent.

In my life, it’s always been about who I’m going to collaborate with. Less important to me is what the subject is.

I loved the whole idea, first of all, of what friendship is. Very often, there are people that somehow you don’t know how to declare that you are their friend, but you are their friend. That happens in a lot in high school. And outside of high school.

I’m certainly a real homebody. But the truth is that I understand that desire to, in a way, go join the circus. That’s what got me out of Long Island and into show business. I was like, ‘I’m just going to have an adventure. I want to be a person that isn’t surrounded by their mail and their cat.’

Series television is kind of intensive in terms of time. You fall hard for TV writing, but it’s almost love-hate. You’re under pressure all the time, but that pressure gets interesting things out of you that are, you know, mysterious.

I consider myself a writer. I always wanted to act, and as a teen, I studied acting devotedly. Eventually, I got writing work, but very little acting work.

The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn’t really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.

When you’re doing a series, you’re really in a zone. You’re thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it’s just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they’re thinking about.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t really know anything about Pearl Jam. Of course, I knew who they were, but I had never really sampled them.

I don’t think of myself as a producer. In television, it’s part of the business – if you progress and become successful as a writer, you’re called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I’m just a writer.