Joss Whedon

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.

Something like 'Much Ado' happens, and even 'Avengers' happens because of the years of building connections and doing the work and proving yourself.

I love TV in a way that I don't love any other medium.

The two things that matter the most to me: emotional resonance and rocket launchers. Party of Five, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers.

I hate it when people talk about Buffy as being campy... I hate camp, I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.

A lot of people who saw 'The Avengers' didn't read comic books, don't like comic book movies, and enjoyed it. That was huge for me.

Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Dont forget food. You can go a week without laughing.

Every writer loves the idea of being able to go in and fix a problem and then leave without obligation. It's fun!

When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life.

I've never met a well-adjusted person. It's weird.

Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.

That title, is one of the things I fought for. A lot of people said "But it's stupid, and it's the title of a comedy movie, and people won't take it seriously," and I'm sure there are some people who still don't. But for the most part, people do see that we really have a quality show.

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don't have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead.

The only way to real mature love is to get past the tropes of what we consider 'romance.'

I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

Sarah Michelle Gellar's made some really good choices. She's had some bad breaks. She goes with the independent, interesting young filmmakers and then they get slammed, like 'Southland Tales.' I'm proud of what she's trying to do. It's hard.

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.

Horror movies don't exist unless you go and see them, and people always will.

The problem for me is that 'Watchmen,' one of the great comics of all time, is a look at superheroes that has gone beyond the concept of or necessity for superheroes.

Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns.

I spent a ton of time alone. I was raised by a feminist; I had a terrifying father and oppressively scary and mean brothers. We had a farm. The rule was between breakfast and lunch you weren't allowed to make a sound.

I think it's not inaccurate to say that I had a perfectly happy childhood during which I was very unhappy.

Writers are completely out of touch with reality. Writers are a crazy person. We create conflict - for a living. We do this all the time, sometimes on a weekly basis; we create horrible, incredible circumstances and then figure a way out of them. That's what we do.

Everything is a drug. Family art causes new shoes... Were all just tweaking our chem to avoid the void.

I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

Absolutely eat dessert first. The thing that you want to do the most do that.

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.

Always be yourself... unless you suck.

I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw.

Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.

'The Sixth Sense' is fine the second time around, but honestly, the first time around, it's dazzling.

If somebody comes up to me, it's because they're moved by something I'm moved by. I've never taken a job I didn't love... So when somebody's coming up to me, or they're writing, they're in the same space I am in.

That's the great thing about 'The West Wing:' you really felt like you were in the thick of it.

Never sit at a table you can't walk away from.

The Internet community started forming right when 'Buffy' started airing, and the notion of a show creator being anything other than a name people recognize on the screen was completely new.

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.

A writer is supposed to have anonymity.

I am a great believer in found families and I'm not a great believer in blood.

I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of 'women are inferior.'

My favorite part of Comic-Con? The groupies.

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.

I've often said there's no such thing as a track record in TV. I seen people who created things much more successful than mine treated like dirt.

I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.

The thing about a hero, is even when it doesn't look like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, he's going to keep trying to do right and make up for what's gone before, just because that's who he is.

You learn something every time you make a mistake.

I don't like uncertainty. I don't play poker. I don't like bluffing.

TV's like whitewater rafting: Without rocks, there wouldn't be rapids, and it wouldn't be as much fun.

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.

Buffy loves Angel. He loves her. And I love Ho Hos.

I like to think that I'm a populist entertainer, but I'm a little bit idiosyncratic, and sometimes the networks wouldn't really roll with that.

My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.

Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.

I think everyone who makes movies should be forced to do television. Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are a lot of decisions made just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the story told and it connects to the audience.

I don't have a particular ambition in any medium. I just want to keep telling stories. If somebody pays me, also good.

I'm a very gentle man, not unlike Gandhi.

I never write anything without humor, just because I like humor, but at the same time, it is a way for anything fantastical to become relatable.

I love all genres. The only thing I get stymied by is the Family Drama. I don't necessarily know how to approach that.

I've been in this business for a long while, but it's not like I've been waiting tables. Since I started writing, I've only worked on things that I love. I've had a lot of heartbreak, but you don't become an artist and not expect that.

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.

I still believe that even though 'The Empire Strikes Back' is better in innumerable ways than 'Star Wars,' 'Star Wars' wins.

I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up. The fun is not that much different from doing a television show: You're stuck with a certain set of rules, and then, rather than trying to break them, it's just trying to peel away and see what's underneath them. That to me is really fun.

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.

I'm not big on regret; I don't spend a lot of time on it.

Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores.

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.

Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women.

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.

The secret to multitasking is that it isn't actually multitasking. It's just extreme focus and organization.

There's a lot of anger in the Twitter-verse, as I've discovered. But there's a lot of love.

The thing with the comics is that you have license to go down every alley your brain can think of.

What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.

On one level, I must never lose touch with my audience. But I must, at some point, stop trying to get everybody to like me, and be true to the thing I think I need to say.

I eat 'The Walking Dead' like its made of brains. Can't even watch the show, I love the book so much.

I am a fan of sequels even though they are inevitably awful.

I'll always protect what I'm working on. Which is why more and more of it is stuff only I can ruin.

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.

Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.

I was never a games night guy, but at some point, social interaction starts to freak me out. So when there's a point, it's easier for me to see the people I love and hang out and try to have fun.

Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.

What I do like is hiking. And that's what filmmaking is. It's a hike. It's challenging and exhausting, and you don't know what the terrain is going to be or necessarily even which direction you're going in... but it sure is beautiful.

The musicals that I love on stage are generally meant for the stage.

I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

'The Dark Knight,' for me, has the same problem that every other 'Batman' movie has. It's not about Batman. I think Heath Ledger is just phenomenal and the character of the Joker is beautifully written. He has a particular philosophy that he carries throughout the movie. He has one of the best bad guy schemes.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

I'm not a leader now. I'm a whole damn army.

Most of the dialogue in 'Speed' is mine, and a bunch of the characters. That was actually pretty much a good experience. I have quibbles. I also have the only poster left with my name still on it. Getting arbitrated off the credits was un-fun.

I never wanted to take a job because I needed money, and I never have.

Oddly enough, I never studied writing. I studied almost everything except writing.

I don't want the giant ego. I don't want to become Kevin Costner, singing on the soundtrack to The Postman.

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.

I think there's a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, 'The kids love this!'

I have an obligation to do press, but I don't have an obligation to stay out dancing until 3 A.M.

The fact is some people really love my work, some people not so much, but at the end of the day, I don't want anybody coming out of the movie thinking about me.

I've had so much success. I had something to say, I got to say it, people heard it, and they agreed. That's every artist's dream. That's the brass ring.

I think 'Batman Begins' is certainly my favorite Batman movie I've seen.

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.

Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck.

It's only recently women got to be action heroes on TV. Progress is slow, and often non-existent. There's plenty of cool comics with female characters... But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.