Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Espenson

In the case of judges, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the number on television exceeds the number in real life — what is it about those black robes that makes us think ovaries?

Mercy is the mark of a great man! (stabs defeated opponent) I guess I'm just a good man. (stabs opponent again) Well ... I'm alright.

Melissa [ Rosenberg] really has mastered coming from character. Everything radiates from the characters in this work. You don't feel like anything's imposed.

We had all been feeling this, about the Buffy/Riley relationship. It never had the fire that Buffy/Angel did. It wasn't really meant to.

It is possible to care too much. It is possible to believe that you will never be as good as anyone else. And it is possible to let these things take over.

You embraced what was already on the page, worked with it, massaged it.

Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.

I recently had to wait two and a half hours in a doctor's office, just waiting to be seen. I literally was genuinely thinking 'Well, maybe this is a time loop.'

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

I watch a lot of TV, but I find that recently it's largely oddball stuff. Scripted stuff sometimes feels like homework, like I'm scoping out the competition or something.

The outside world is what kept Buffy and Angel from being together.

I saw it on the Twitter of today, on the online boards. There was a huge amount of negative reaction that's been forgotten because the quality eventually shined through. But usually it takes people a while to see what they've got on their plate. And I think, with "Jessica Jones," it's this anomalous thing where, and because of the original property being so good, people saw it right away, which is very unusual.

If something needed to be written, if something needed to be polished, needed to be re-written, I was just handed pages.

I know I'm not great at structure and story.

I think we should all start worrying about being downloaded and put in robots.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Think about it. People aren't out to get you, they're just stupid.

You are full of love. You love with all of your soul. It's brighter than the fire ... blinding. That's why you pull away from it ... Love is pain ... Love ... give ... forgive. Risk the pain. It is your nature.

I like the way that Dexter mixed humor, dark humor and tragedy, in a way I don't think that I've seen another show do. To handle those tonal shifts with so much confidence. Normally, you can mix humor and dark humor, you can mix dark humor and tragedy, but to mix all three... There are just moments with Robin and Reuben, the next door neighbors, that are just funny.

Forgive my rudeness. I cannot abide useless people.

I think people look back on shows like "Firefly" or "Buffy," and they remember it with this glow about it of positive response, but if you look back... If Twitter had existed, there would have been a lot of negative tweeting about "Firefly."

Movies are always made by committees, and the writer is not at the head of the committee. Thus, mush.

Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy - it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.

I hope I am pigeonholed with comedy. I'm really not interested in writing the darker stuff, the emotional stuff.