A Quote by Jenji Kohan

You spend so much of your life crafting this stuff that you want to laugh in the room. I don't want to sit there and slit my wrists. And I think it reflects reality. People use humor to survive, even in the most horrific situations.
It's such a great feeling to make people laugh. I know I've made people cry or want to slit their wrists, but to make people laugh is a very intoxicating, wonderful thing.
I think that even in a drama, we all want to smile, and laugh because what a horrible life if we're just like "I'm in a drama." And so I think in everything you're trying to look for the humor, even if it's a dark scene, because most people want to have fun in life, as opposed to have a boring time, a terrible time.
I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.
Nobody is in their right to tell anybody how to spend their free time. If you like to spend it with your family or your kids, fantastic. If you want to spend it with your girlfriend, great. If you want to spend it doing charitable work, great. If you want to spend it through endorsements and marketing stuff, great.
It is really rare to find someone you really, really love and that you want to spend your life with and all that stuff that goes along with being married. I am one of those lucky people. And I think she feels that way too. So the romantic stuff is easy because you want them to be happy.
I think shows that are completely dramatic are a lie. People use humor to cope. That is how we deal with things. In the darkest situations, there's humor. And if you don't show that, you're not being true to real life.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
To call them emotional comedies sounds cloying. Like Billy Wilder said, 'You want to make them laugh and you want to make them cry,' and it's very hard to do so. If you ground it in reality, you get a more honest comedy. You don't have to reach for jokes to manufacture situations as much. And I think it's a type of film I do best.
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
My thing in this day and age, with reality television and so much other stuff that is going on, is people want to feel the reality. They want to relate.
I'm never going to stop making theatre, but I don't think I'll make it as much, because I don't need to. There are other things I want to do with my life. I want to sit by the sea in Yorkshire and eat Eccles cakes and spend time with my family.
You know, people don't want their intelligence insulted. They don't want to be preached to. They don't want to be degraded. All they want to do is sit, laugh, have a good time, love one another, forget about what's going on in the world, and find something out so they can be useful in this life. Do this and you have common sense.
If you want to spend more money in restaurants, use credit cards more than cash. If you want to spend less, use cash more than credit cards. But in general, we can think about how to use the pain of paying and how much of it do we want. And I think we have like a range. Credit cards have very little pain of paying, debit cards have a little bit more because you feel like today, at least it is coming out of your checking account, and cash has much more.
You get an audience to laugh and then show them something horrific, it's going to be even more horrific because they've had the release of the laugh before it.
I want to be really clear about something: I think we kind of fetishize the creative life. We have the vision of what it means to be an author, where you sit in your garret or looking out at your view and you give everything to your art and you commit fully to it. But the reality is that most of us have bills to pay.
I think God is something that people use to avoid reality. I think faith allows people to reject what is right in front of our eyes, which is that thing, this life, this existence, this consciousness, or whatever word you want to use for it, is all we have, and all we'll ever have. I think people have faith because they want and need to believe in something, whatever that something is, because life can be hard and depressing and brutal if you don't.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!