Mike White Quotes

People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there’s a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.

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

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

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.

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

I used to have a road-rage issue.

‘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.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

There’s something magical about Oaxaca and the vibe of the people.

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

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

Most of the shows I’ve worked on have aired three times and are in the dustbin of history.

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

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

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.

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

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

I just think there are certain men who feel like engaging in a story told from a female point of view is somehow a feminizing experience. And that itself is something that they’re almost supposed to not want to engage.

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.

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.

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

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

I think movie sets can often be stressful, and people take themselves very seriously.

I’m a weird guy. I’m practically albino. What about me isn’t weird?

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.

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

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.

As an actor and a writer, the anxiety about doing TV is that you start to feel like you get married to one tone or one kind of idea and you feel like you want to be able to express a lot of different things.

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

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

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

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.

It’s always interesting to challenge yourself to say, ‘Is this the best you can do?’