A Quote by Shonda Rhimes

You have to have more people who don't look like you in the writers room. I try to have some people who don't look like me in my writers room. I think it's important to have a group of voices, of people who can dissent.
..few writers like other writers' works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don't even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother. I'd rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.
I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.
I don't think that I would go into the writers' room because they work really hard and I feel like I'm already working really hard to shoot my part of the show. Also, I haven't written in a writers' room before, it's kinda intimidating to walk in there.
That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
My favorite thing about acting is you have to learn how to work with people that you probably would never try to. Some people just aren't supposed to be in a room together, and you have to be in a room with a group of people who might not all get along and you have to figure out how to come together for one thing. That collaboration is special, and people don't get to exercise that. I think that's why people become stubborn, and I think that's why people become uninspired to change. In this job you have to.
If I took perfect pictures all the time, the people standing in the room with me, or on the carpet, would think, 'What an actress! What a faker!' That thought embarrasses me so much that I look like s**t in half my photos, and I don't give a f***. What matters to me is that the people in the room leave and say, 'She was cool. She had a good time. She was honest.'
I think a lot of times people look at me and say, 'Well, we can't possibly hand a show over to her to run.' It seemed like executives would be worried about me controlling a room and having power, and I'd say, 'Oh, I can control a room. I can give an order like nobody's business.'
A lot of what you're seeing these characters go through is something that either is a story one of the actors told in the writers' room or one of the writers themselves told in the writers' room.
If you look at the body of any writers' work, you can figure out the questions that animate them. I think that is what real writers do. They don't tell people how to live or what to think. They write in order to try to answer their own deepest questions.
I think it is very important that you like yourself for who you are and not want to look like anyone else. You also have to understand, many people have had cosmetic surgeries in order to look the way they look. So why look like them when you can just look like you? And there is nothing wrong with looking like you.
You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.
Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.
On 'The Deuce,' the writers' room gets like group therapy.
There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
Some people say that you should go to all the parties, to the nightclubs, the Viper Room, and make contacts, and I look at them and say, 'You don't want to have contacts with those people.' Look at what happened to River Phoenix [who died in 1993 of a drug overdose outside the Viper Room]. If you get caught up in that, it ruins you. Hollywood is garbage.
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