Mike White quotes:

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 have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

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.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

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.

Production for movies or TV is very painstaking and slow.

There's something very touching to me about someone almost communicating to themselves in some way - trying to come to some deeper understanding of yourself and having compassion for yourself.

Yeah, it's disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.

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.

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 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.

People kind of stumble their way through life a lot of times.

I used to have a road-rage issue.

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.

I believe, in general, that even people that are self-pitying, you can feel for them.

My whole life I've been a seeker, searching for something.

I don't feel the breath of a thousand people over my shoulder.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

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.

If I have a male protagonist, it's a studio movie, and if it's a female protagonist, it's an indie movie. That's just how it is. It's not about the studios. It's about America and who goes to see movies. Women are interested in men and women, and men aren't interested in the woman's story. They just aren't.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

To be perfectly honest, I'm competitive.

It's fun when you create a world to inhabit it and see the other characters from grounds eye view.

As an actor, it's better to just be more loose and give yourself over. That's always fun. It's fun to just let go and be somebody else.

I grew up in a religious family, and we weren't allowed to listen to rock music.

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.

You want to work with people who you like and have an easy rapport with.

The purpose of making people feel uncomfortable is to play with their preconceptions.

I'm attracted to polarizing characters who upend the civility of life.

I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.

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.

I can be really annoying, but I also feel like I'm a nice person.

I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it!

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.

There's a victory in letting go of your expectations.

There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.

A flower doesn't love you or hate you, it just exists.

From my experience, meditating can bring up the most stressful thoughts.

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.

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 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.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

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.

For me, writing is a solitary thing and a personal thing. And it's weird, because when you make something that requires money and collaborators, you have to talk about them. I don't enjoy that part of it. I still want to keep it to myself.

I actually think it's helped me as a writer to have to act. It's only when you actually start putting yourself out that you appreciate the anxiety that comes with having to try to sell a line, or with trying to own a character.

I do idiosyncratic dramedies.

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 feel like so much of my life is about a conversation I'm having with myself. I do interact with other people, but often I'm more interested in what I'm learning in the relationship I have with myself.

I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.

I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.

I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change

I'm not really a director or producer for hire. There's lots of big gigs out there, but I'm not looking to do that. Usually, when I'm directing or producing, I've written it myself. I'm not really trying to get on some big horse that's running through town. I just make my own stuff.

I've never been to the Oscars, but if I was ever invited to the Oscars, I would have this weird paranoia of terrorism. It just feels like The Poseidon Adventure, everyone in their tuxes. Somehow, I feel like the whole time I would be looking for where the nearest exit was, and in a cold sweat about some kind of man-made disaster, like a terrorist strike or something. It seems like such a scary, claustrophobic proposition.

People don't go to see things in the theater for the same reasons that I do. And movies are about mass audiences. And so moviegoers are going for a different kind of drug than for a certain kind of literary quality.

People who write books - they live in their own world as they're writing. But people who are doing shows or big movies - not only are you writing this world that you're living in, but you're also simultaneously running a circus, and you can kind of start losing your mind like that.

To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.