Top 60 Shonda Rhimes Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Shonda Rhimes Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

There's nothing wrong with being driven. And there's no

There’s nothing wrong with being driven. And there’s nothing wrong with putting yourself first to reach your goals.
Shonda Rhimes
I binge pretty much everything. If I’m watching something, I’m bingeing it. I binged ‘The Good Place’ recently. ‘Handmaid’s Tale.’
Shonda Rhimes
I learned how to write TV by writing ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’
Shonda Rhimes
It’s important to have people who are absolutely willing to say you’re wrong or who have a totally different perspective than you do on everything. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, and good ones are even harder.
Shonda Rhimes
Most people, I think, have accepted that it’s not up to them to control other people’s choices, except, it seems, when it comes to Washington, D.C., where everyone has an opinion about people’s uteruses.
Shonda Rhimes
I’d split up with a boyfriend and gone to Vermont to stare at my navel, and then 9/11 happened, and I spent days being scared of what was happening in the world. So I made a list of all the things I wanted to do, and at the top was adopt a baby. Nine months and two days later, I brought my daughter home.
Shonda Rhimes
I’ve learned this is a very long marriage doing a television show. I like the people that I work with to be people I enjoy, so you want to cast people who are as excited and enthusiastic as you are.
Shonda Rhimes
I love having boyfriends. I love dating. I do not want a husband in my house.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t know that I think women have to throw out the fairy tale ending. I just think they have to decide what their fairy tale ending is – and not go with the standard one that everyone’s told them they’re supposed to have.
Shonda Rhimes
Work doesn’t work without play.
Shonda Rhimes
That first year I was doing ‘Grey’s,’ I didn’t know it was possible to fire the creator of a show off their own show, so I didn’t behave like somebody who was afraid of being fired.
Shonda Rhimes
I truly feel like my job is to make the shows. That’s what I’m paid to do. It’s somebody else’s job to market them, and it’s somebody else’s job to pay attention to the ratings, because if I paid attention to all that, my head would explode.
Shonda Rhimes
The way I write my shows, every character is its own organic thing. No character has a life at all until I see it played by somebody.
Shonda Rhimes
I’ve always said if I’m winning at one thing, I’m failing at another.
Shonda Rhimes
We have people say, ‘There’s not enough women writers.’ I have a writers room that is almost nothing but women over at ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’
Shonda Rhimes
When the script is finished, and you’re sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you’ve written, and you’re hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t get to watch a lot of TV, mainly because I’m busy working. And I pretty much try not to watch very much television at all, even American television, until I’m done with a season, because things start to creep into my head otherwise.
Shonda Rhimes
No matter how you feel about social media, you can’t deny the giant that is Facebook.
Shonda Rhimes
Sometimes people don’t want to be empowered because they are afraid of being the person to make the decisions.
Shonda Rhimes
A movie is a movie is a movie. But it has to have an adjective in front of it if it’s not a white guy’s movie.
Shonda Rhimes
In my house, you got in trouble if you didn’t speak up. My mom would be furious at us if we went to school and behaved nicely if someone treated us badly. If we got in trouble because we had yelled at them or told them that they were wrong, my mother would be like, ‘Good job.’
Shonda Rhimes
I want to be able to sing like Whitney Houston did.
Shonda Rhimes
I actually like being alone. I spend most evenings reading and taking long baths.
Shonda Rhimes
I’ve never personally had to use a Planned Parenthood. But I have many friends who have and do and did, and I think it’s important that that access be there for everyone.
Shonda Rhimes
When I’m hard at work, when I’m deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyonce. And it is all of those things at the same time.
Shonda Rhimes
A lot of people think that they are leaders just because they have been placed in charge of something – and you’re not.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t think of myself as a television producer. Obviously, that’s crazy. Because I should. That’s what I do. But I don’t actually see that as my job. It’s why my business cards say ‘storyteller.’
Shonda Rhimes
What’s great about Netflix is that everything is kind of instantaneous, and it goes around the world instantly. Everything is released at once. The format can be a little bit whatever you want.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t know why people don’t feel like being positive is much more powerful than being negative.
Shonda Rhimes
I have all these friends who just love therapy, and I always say the reason that I’m absolutely not in therapy is because then I wouldn’t have anything to write.
Shonda Rhimes
I work for ABC. If the thing that ABC is paying me for is storytelling – not to make sure that a costume is exactly right or all those other things – then it is up to me to find the most creative space possible so that that function of my job can happen.
Shonda Rhimes
I like people with their own opinions, and I like peopl

I like people with their own opinions, and I like people who argue with me. It’s very exhausting to be in a room full of people who just nod and smile.
Shonda Rhimes
I can’t change the past. It made me what I am.
Shonda Rhimes
There is a part of me that’s oblivious. People always ask me, ‘What obstacles have you faced?’ and I always think, ‘What are you talking about?’ Whether or not there were obstacles, I never saw obstacles. It’s never occurred to me that I wasn’t good enough for something.
Shonda Rhimes
I never, ever pay attention to the ratings. I stopped paying attention to the ratings somewhere around season two or three of ‘Grey’s.’ It’s something I have no control over, so I don’t even pay attention.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t think that my job requires me to be competitive at all. I’m in my office by myself, or I’m in my writers’ room with my people. I’ve chosen a job in which there’s no competition allowed. It’s probably best for everyone.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t ever approach anything from the issue first, so I can’t tell you that I’ve thought about tackling universal health care. I’d have to have some great story I’d want to tell, and then universal health care would become part of the way to tell that story.
Shonda Rhimes
My daughter thinks my shows suck.
Shonda Rhimes
I spent a lot of times sitting in big rooms full of a lot of men and executives thinking, ‘What would Oprah say right now?’ and trying to channel that as hard as I could. And mostly that was just about having the confidence. If this woman did it, it can be done. And there’s no reason for anybody to stop you.
Shonda Rhimes
Most writing staffs have this crazy high turnover, and then everyone’s really miserable, and I don’t understand that. I don’t know why you don’t grow people to then be able to take over as you. That’s how I can have more shows.
Shonda Rhimes
I’m not a person who’s interested in getting involved with politics just to get involved with them, and I don’t need to.
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t identify with her, but I highly admire Eleanor Roosevelt.
Shonda Rhimes
My philosophy was always try to look like Whitney Houston at all times. That did not work out so well.
Shonda Rhimes
This is going to sound crazy, but there was a period of time where on TLC they would show those surgeries – like a woman had a 90-pound tumor, or they separated these twins. And my sister and I – she lived in Ohio when I lived in California – would watch them together on the phone.
Shonda Rhimes
I like working more than I like being at home. Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home?
Shonda Rhimes
I don’t think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.
Shonda Rhimes
The idea that the more you hide something, the more it becomes something that’s supposed to feel shameful is very true.
Shonda Rhimes
I believe that good television should be challenging and frustrating and maddening and thrilling. If you just want to see people who look like you and think like you and do what you would do in any given situation, you’d have to stop looking at TV and start looking in a mirror. But would that be as much fun?
Shonda Rhimes
I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I’m doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.
Shonda Rhimes
I am never worried that I’m not gonna get my work done. I was the kid who got straight As and was a little too intense in school. Like, I am a perfectionist, and I am going to sit at the front of the class with my hand raised.
Shonda Rhimes
I have found that if I spend the first hour of my day at home, I get more done, and less people steal my time.
Shonda Rhimes
My worst trait is that I’m an introvert. When I’ve led stuff, the hardest thing for me to overcome has been my natural desire to run and hide. I’m very proud of the fact that I have been able to do that.
Shonda Rhimes
Getting on a plane and discovering that your seat belt won’t fit around you was a moment of extreme horror. It was very hard to ignore.
Shonda Rhimes
I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there’s such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can’t imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don’t believe there is room for all of it. I really don’t.
Shonda Rhimes