132 Quotes by Mike White

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

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

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.

I feel like so much of my life is about a conversation I’m having with myself. I do interact with other people, but often I’m more interested in what I’m learning in the relationship I have with myself.

People who write books – they live in their own world as they’re writing. But people who are doing shows or big movies – not only are you writing this world that you’re living in, but you’re also simultaneously running a circus, and you can kind of start losing your mind like that.

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.

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.

I think living in our culture right now, there’s a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that’s rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

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