29 Quotes by Winnie Holzman

Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth - that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me.

I loved the whole idea, first of all, of what friendship is. Very often, there are people that somehow you don't know how to declare that you are their friend, but you are their friend. That happens in a lot in high school. And outside of high school.

When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.

Series television is kind of intensive in terms of time. You fall hard for TV writing, but it's almost love-hate. You're under pressure all the time, but that pressure gets interesting things out of you that are, you know, mysterious.

The whole idea of a dream, to me, is a mystery plane. Things are operating there that tell us the real truth. The stuff going on inside us that we don't express or even know about pours out in our dreams.

I consider myself a writer. I always wanted to act, and as a teen, I studied acting devotedly. Eventually, I got writing work, but very little acting work.

I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.

I care about actors, and I understand them in a very personal way. I'm not saying every writer has to do that, but in my case, it's been helpful. I can put myself into the scene and think, 'What would it be like to act this?' Any writer who's really good probably does that to some extent.

I don't think of myself as a producer. In television, it's part of the business - if you progress and become successful as a writer, you're called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I'm just a writer.