I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.
— Mike White
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.
My whole life I've been a seeker, searching for something.
I do idiosyncratic dramedies.
There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.
I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.
There's something magical about Oaxaca and the vibe of the people.
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.
A flower doesn't love you or hate you, it just exists.
People kind of stumble their way through life a lot of times.
I'm a weird guy. I'm practically albino. What about me isn't weird?
You come to a point where you realize your work doesn't save you.
As an actor and a writer, the anxiety about doing TV is that you start to feel like you get married to one tone or one kind of idea and you feel like you want to be able to express a lot of different things.
I started as a writer; I started writing when I was little. The acting and directing was an outgrowth of my desire to tell stories.
It's fun when you create a world to inhabit it and see the other characters from grounds eye view.
I think movie sets can often be stressful, and people take themselves very seriously.
I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.
From my experience, meditating can bring up the most stressful thoughts.
I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it!
As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.
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.
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.
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.
You can come to a political position from an emotional place.
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.
There's a victory in letting go of your expectations.
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.
The purpose of making people feel uncomfortable is to play with their preconceptions.
I can be really annoying, but I also feel like I'm a nice person.
I used to have a road-rage issue.
I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.
I don't even give my scripts to friends because I just feel it's, like, I don't need one more set of opinions.
I remember I grew up in Pasadena in a very, kind of, homogeneous, kind of, suburban existence and then I went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And there were all these, kind of, hipster New York kids who were so-called 'cultured' and had so much, you know, like knew all the references and, like, already had their look down.
My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.
You watch stuff like 'The Real Housewives' and you start to think, 'We're all so vacuous! Is there any nobility to any of these people?' But then you look out into the world, and there are people who are doing cool stuff with their lives.
Yeah, it's disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.
You want to work with people who you like and have an easy rapport with.
To be perfectly honest, I'm competitive.
To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.
'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.
The things that drive me crazy are coming from this place of people suffering because of people polluting into rivers or whatever. It's not simply just about systems; it's an emotional reaction to seeing animals or people suffering.
It's always interesting to challenge yourself to say, 'Is this the best you can do?'
My first job was with 'Dawson's Creek' where everybody looked good and they spoke better than you. It was kind of a wish fulfillment, fantasy-type show.
I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.
I'm attracted to polarizing characters who upend the civility of life.
I believe, in general, that even people that are self-pitying, you can feel for them.
I grew up in a religious family, and we weren't allowed to listen to rock music.
My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.
I used to go online all the time, and then I had to stop myself... because I'm a writer, and it's like: to have a procrastination tool, like, within my computer... it was just getting too hairy.
People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there's a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.
