Top 40 Mike White Quotes

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

I started as a writer; I started writing when I was little. The acting and directing was an outgrowth of my desire to tell stories.

My first job was with ‘Dawson’s Creek’ where everybody looked good and they spoke better than you. It was kind of a wish fulfillment, fantasy-type show.

Most of the shows I’ve worked on have aired three times and are in the dustbin of history.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that’s about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

There’s something very touching to me about someone almost communicating to themselves in some way – trying to come to some deeper understanding of yourself and having compassion for yourself.

Production for movies or TV is very painstaking and slow.

I guess I’m trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain – that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

I’m not looking to be the King of Comedy, or the King of Hollywood. I just want to be able to keep making stuff that I’m into and have the opportunity to challenge myself with, wearing different hats.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you’re a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.

I don’t even give my scripts to friends because I just feel it’s, like, I don’t need one more set of opinions.

There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.

I used to have a road-rage issue.

The purpose of making people feel uncomfortable is to play with their preconceptions.

I think I’m more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I’m more of a – humanist? I hate to say it!

I think movie sets can often be stressful, and people take themselves very seriously.

I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.

I believe, in general, that even people that are self-pitying, you can feel for them.

There’s something magical about Oaxaca and the vibe of the people.

I do idiosyncratic dramedies.

To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.

There’s a victory in letting go of your expectations.

I just think there are certain men who feel like engaging in a story told from a female point of view is somehow a feminizing experience. And that itself is something that they’re almost supposed to not want to engage.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out – and this happens to me a lot, actually – the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

A flower doesn’t love you or hate you, it just exists.

I grew up in a religious family, and we weren’t allowed to listen to rock music.

It’s fun when you create a world to inhabit it and see the other characters from grounds eye view.

I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there’s funny stuff in it but I’ve lost the emotional connection to the characters because it’s just so bananas.

It’s fun as a creator to make something that allows multiple interpretations.

You can come to a political position from an emotional place.

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it’s rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

My whole life I’ve been a seeker, searching for something.

I have had moments where I’ve had mental-health issues and I’ve felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

I’m a weird guy. I’m practically albino. What about me isn’t weird?

People kind of stumble their way through life a lot of times.

Yeah, it’s disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.