Top 55 Lisa Joy Quotes

For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.

Westworld is an examination of human nature: the best parts of human nature… but also, violence, sexual violence have sadly been a fact of human history since the beginning of human history.

The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.

A lot of times, people say, ‘My work didn’t suffer with family.’ I would go a step further: My career only flourished upon having children. It got better.

Holding women to the idea of ‘write what you know’ subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it’s also a chance to celebrate who we could be.

But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn’t ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn’t ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.

I try not to look at press. However, I have a mother, who will gladly tell me what’s going on out there.

I was actually born a robot, so ‘Westworld’ is just autobiographical.

I personally am not so obsessed about immortality for myself. The human body has been designed that way, obsolescence is OK.

I represent opportunities for other women and other people of color, and I’m trying to start my own kind of movement.

It’s wonderful to work with actors we haven’t worked with before.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you’re so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

What does the future of ‘Westworld’ look like? I don’t necessarily think that we’ve seen the last of these artificial worlds that are central to the concept of our series as a whole. But the major lens that we will have is going to be the real world.

Feeling trapped in identity isn’t just the purview of women and minorities.

Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.

Our memories, the way we tend to experience them, are sort of fuzzy around the edges, like a watercolor that has bled into the past and is not totally clear.

Working on ‘Westworld’ has been an incredible experience in learning to make something with the scope of a feature on a TV timeline with a budget nowhere near what you would expect for a feature film equivalent.

Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I’d wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I’d sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.

And nowadays, the idea of AI is not really science fiction anymore – it’s just science fact.

I think it’s a very powerful notion, the notion that our personal views, although closely held, are not necessarily right. That part of what is noble is making sure there are checks and balances and a plurality of opinions.

At first, ‘Westworld’ was a project we had declined to do.

The ways in which mankind tends to invent technology is because we have this drive to create and to innovate, and we don’t necessarily pump the brakes when we’re doing it.

I had a lot of college debt. It’s very difficult to go to a university that is as expensive as Stanford and then blindly follow your passions when they don’t immediately make money out of the gate.

I didn’t need a harassment scandal to break out in Hollywood or misogynistic people in government to know they exist. Anybody who’s a woman, a minority, or a thinking, perceiving male can see that it exists.

I think that sense of wonderment, where you walk out expecting the ordinary and are confronted by the extraordinary, is something that has always interested me, whether in TV or comic books.

The reality is that ‘Westworld’ is designed so that guests can indulge with impunity their every fantasy – be it light or dark. So the hosts experience the extremes in human behavior, good and bad.

I think the thing that will endure about Westworld will be the questions it poses.

I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.

Another writer might question whether you’re feeling competitive. But if I talk to Jonah, I know that he truly values my success more than his own. And I truly value his success more than my own. There’s a generosity there.

One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not.

For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you’re choosing that people don’t consciously pick up on, but that they feel.

The sensibility I brought to directing was similar to what I bring when I write.

In ‘Lost,’ they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn’t need to dissect and open up. And that’s absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.

America is built on the labors of the oppressed.

If you play a game like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ you don’t go home afterwards and cry because you ran over a couple characters, because you do not give them personhood.

I feel like there is just never a good time for taking a chance and following your dreams – whatever those dreams are.

I’ve tried to always be incredibly overprepared in everything that I’ve done.

I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.

I do love Westerns. But, in a way, traditional Westerns, for me, have been hard to love viscerally and personally.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

When I used to watch Westerns, I could admire the craft, but I never really loved them; they never spoke to me. Maybe because I’m first-generation American, I’m a woman, and I just didn’t see myself reflected.

And I think the greatest danger that AI poses isn’t so much these anthropomorphic beings who look like us and are beguiling are going to fool us. It’s the fact that a intelligence without a body or corporeal form will fool us into trusting it with data, which we seem to think is… it has no repercussions.

Traditional westerns typify some of the hardships men face: you have to be rugged, silent, stoic. It’s a man against nature, against the world.

You have to be very specific with the suggestions of how you want to show things, not just with dialogue but also place and mood. I write all of that as very vivid guidelines so directors can come in and do what they will with them.

But I’m the child of a tiger mom.

There’s a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t think it would really be possible.

The appealing thing to me about Wonder Woman is the question of, who is this woman in tights and leotard walking around? What’s her story and how does it resonate with women today?

You know, both my parents aren’t really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it’s how I make a living.

Being a lawyer, it’s like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it’s lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.

Part of what you try and do when you’re writing is to just transcend politics and the moment in a way and talk about something, those fundamental building blocks of building nature.

How many of us have these demons or habits or things we don’t like about ourselves and understand the loops that we’re in and yet are unable to break out of them and create lasting change within ourselves?

Since time immemorial we’ve explored these ideas of tragedy, the things people do for love, the great weight that occurs when love is taken away and the great length and the heroism that people will exhibit to fight for the ones that they love.

There are very few video games where there are – like, completely pacifistic – and if there are, I tend to play them – ‘Dance Dance Revolution,’ there was a game called ‘Flower’ that I really enjoy.