I think it's not inaccurate to say that I had a perfectly happy childhood during which I was very unhappy.
— Joss Whedon
Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.
There's a lot of anger in the Twitter-verse, as I've discovered. But there's a lot of love.
I'm never interested in movies where you don't care about the people you're watching, and that's my biggest quibble about horror, that kids have gotten stupider and stupider.
My favorite part of Comic-Con? The groupies.
What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.
Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.
Kristen Stewart is kind of captivating; she can just stare at stuff and it works because I still want to watch it.
Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.
TV's like whitewater rafting: Without rocks, there wouldn't be rapids, and it wouldn't be as much fun.
I think to an extent every human being needs to be redeemed somewhat or at least needs to look at themselves and say, 'I've made mistakes, I'm off course, I need to change.' Which is probably the hardest thing for a human being to do, and maybe that's why it interests me so.
I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.
I always watch what I say. I am what I say.
I don't have a particular ambition in any medium. I just want to keep telling stories. If somebody pays me, also good.
I've seen plenty of films where the projector broke. The problems that we have in the digital age are exactly the same as we had. Instead of, 'There's a hair in the gate,' it's, 'The computer ate the footage.' There will always be things like that going on. Nothing is perfect.
Every time you work on a project, it's a little vacation from the project you're working on the other 23 hours. That's the thing - it replenishes you to do something else.
We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.
I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies' man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn't like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential 'God, I exist, and nobody cares' of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me.
The networks have a particular agenda, a particular model and structure. It doesn't have anything to do with content. This is not a dis on them - they are a business model, run by business people.
There are two things that I cannot resist: one is musicals and the other is a spaceship in trouble. But I am smart enough not to combine the two things.
I am not a fan of referencing your own work when it's in a different universe than what you're doing. That, to me, is a wink at the audience, and winking isn't actually cool when you're not, like, 10.
You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.
An audience who watches my shows knows who I am, knows that right when they think I'm going to make a joke, I'm going to blow something up, or during the worst peril, I'm going to have someone give someone a kiss - it's just going to happen.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
I have an obligation to do press, but I don't have an obligation to stay out dancing until 3 A.M.
I've never met a well-adjusted person. It's weird.
You can't be a storyteller and a speechwriter at the same time.
I would love to give you a more in-depth coherent explanation of my view of the soul, and if I had one I would. The soul and my concept of it are as ephemeral as anybody's, and possibly more so.
I love a straightforward character. I am the guy who loves Cyclops on the 'X-Men', because he is square.
Horror movies don't exist unless you go and see them, and people always will.
I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of 'women are inferior.'
My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.
Making 'The Avengers' was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous. I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera, which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.
I get recognized just often enough to keep my ego bouncing along, but not so much that I can't go places.
I'm a very gentle man, not unlike Gandhi.
In TV, there's so much compromise, it does start to grate a bit. But if you're a writer or an actor, it really is the place to be.
A great scientist is more open to a new idea than almost anybody.
When I was a kid, maybe 11, I remember saying, 'When I grow up I wanna have enough money to buy a really cool car, because I won't.'
TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.
There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible, their reactions to it are very normal.
I don't believe in creating exclusionary art.
I eat 'The Walking Dead' like its made of brains. Can't even watch the show, I love the book so much.
It's not any huge secret that I'm an atheist.
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it.
People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There's nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing.
You know, the thing that I do to waste time is think of things I want to make. That's how my mind is employed.
What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.
I respect the rules of TV, the rules of keeping things commercial and interesting and pop-y and fun.
I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.
Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.
