You come to a point where you realize your work doesn't save you.
The purpose of making people feel uncomfortable is to play with their preconceptions.
I'm a weird guy. I'm practically albino. What about me isn't weird?
I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.
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.
It's always interesting to challenge yourself to say, 'Is this the best you can do?'
To me, this is from a Buddhist perspective or whatever, sometimes people who are working out their political beliefs, they can rage against the man, and yet at the same time can be oblivious to their own way of stepping on the foot of the person right next to them.
As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture.
You can come to a political position from an emotional place.
'Girls' is a huge show, as far as buzz, and magazine covers, and getting a ton of copy, and awards. And yet I don't think the viewership is huge.
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.
I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.
To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.
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.
To be perfectly honest, I'm competitive.
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.
I do idiosyncratic dramedies.
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.
From my experience, meditating can bring up the most stressful thoughts.
I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.
