I actually like being alone. I spend most evenings reading and taking long baths.
You can't tell stories and really walk in someone's shoes and not have a love for them, even if they're doing horrible things.
Work doesn't work without play.
I don't know why people don't feel like being positive is much more powerful than being negative.
I think I'm most proud of the fact that I have figured out how to exist as both a creative person and artist, and a businesswoman and manager. Because those two things do not go together.
A woman who doesn't want to have kids is sort of a mystery to people. That's a question they're asked the minute they get married, it's a question they're asked constantly, 'Don't you want to have kids?' And I feel like that's completely unfair.
You could be a woman in Alabama who's a conservative Christian, or you could be a total crunchy-granola woman in Seattle and 20 years old, and both of you would watch Oprah.
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.'
Calling a show a 'guilty pleasure' is like saying 'I'm embarrassed to say I watch it but I can't stop.' That's not a compliment.
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.
When you help make people healthier, it makes the nation healthier; it makes the world healthier. It makes the economy healthier.
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.
Let's be honest: I call myself a titan. I've got issues.
I do say all I've ever written about is being alone. And most people take that as, 'Oh, that's so sad.' And I always say, 'No. No, all I ever write about is being alone, and sometimes that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.'
My favorite thing to do is rip the covers off a script when reading for writers to hire and make everybody read without names on the covers of the script. I can't tell you how many times my writers, women and men, will pick people of color and women much more often than they would with a cover on the script.
Most of the women I saw on TV didn't seem like people I actually knew. They felt like ideas of what women are.
I love having boyfriends. I love dating. I do not want a husband in my house.
I've been a writer since I was a kid. I've been a writer since I was, you know, dictating stories into a tape deck and trying to get my mom to type them up - when I was really, really little.
I really do feel like the work and time we spend avoiding having difficult conversations is so much more wasteful and painful and time-consuming than actually having the difficult conversation.
There are stories to be told that are still untold and characters to be portrayed that haven't been portrayed correctly. So there's work to be done.
