Producers From The United States

"Trans visibility day, whatever the hell that means, March 31st is the day that someone designated, I believe, in 2009 for this day. It happened to coincide with Easter this year, and no one over there had the idea that, I don’t know, maybe the holiest day on the Christian calendar, perhaps we could just move Trans Visibility Day? April Fool’s Day would be a good day for that, in my opinion."

"Hopefully, more Americans will also come to know the Donald Trump I know – caring, compassionate, and delivering justice with humanity for all Americans."

"We have lawsuits in 81 states right now."

"1.Don't settle for a life that is less than you deserve.2.Your dreams are worth pursuing, no matter how big they may seem."

"15 Aug 2022 — I am Queen of the most powerful nation in the world! And my entire family is gone! Have I not given everything?"

"The three things I said when I came out of school were I want to work consistently, I want to do good work and I want to be paid fairly, and that's happened"

"When you realize that every breath is a gift from God. When you realize how small you are, but how much he loved you. That he, Jesus, would die, the son of God .."

"You don’t have to be stick thin, you can be you and I love that."

"Every actor has some form of stage fright, but, if you love what you do, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just part of the game."

"I feel like with as much blood of my ancestors that has been shed to build this country, this is my country. I feel like I have more of a right here than anyone else."

"I love doing stand-up. ... That's where I feel like I can be free."

"Oh, shoot. That's right. I forgot. I'm a black, lesbian female, and they aren't ready for this yet."

"I hope we can get to a place where it’s normal to say, “Yeah, my wife and I,” and it’s not, “oh my god!” Which is why it’s important to have representation."

"But they weren't ready to see a black woman who happens to be a lesbian also making fun of the president."

"If your family isn’t supportive, you're going to find somebody who would be that surrogate parent who will love you and take care of you. You’ll make family. I did. Know that there’s places and people who will love you—and you can and you will have an amazing life."

"I think what I would say to her is No. 1 focus on self-love"

""While I undeniably cherish the various roles I play in my life, it became imperative for me to delve deeper into understanding who Tia, the individual, is and what brings happiness to her life"

"A major revelation for me was the recognition that I am in a perpetual state of evolution, and not only is this acceptable, but it's actually wonderful"

"It signifies personal growth and the capacity to acquire knowledge and self-improvement."

"Meaning, really look deep into yourself and really get to know yourself, understand yourself. And a lot of that happens in some sort of isolation."

"The more I prioritize self-care and ensure my own well-being, the more effectively I can support and assist others. Once my cup is full, I can be better at filling up those in my community!"

"When you love — truly, truly love yourself — you start to understand self-worth, self-value, and what it is that you deserve."

"I was at the movies yesterday, and before the movie started they had this long ad where they were trying to say … "Don't download things illegally" et cetera. And … they were like, "You wouldn't steal a purse, would you? You wouldn't think of stealing a car." And I was thinking about it … and I was like, "You know what? I would steal a car if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then 30 seconds later I own the car." And, like, I would steal a car if … [even though I stole] the car, the person who owned the car got to keep the car. And I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives."

"When you’re starting out [as a television writer], mostly it’s terrifying because you think you could get fired and then never get hired again. If you see some of the statistics for women of color on writing staffs, you’ll see that even if there’s parity, it’s so hard to get promoted and stay on a show. A whopping majority of upper-level writers are still white men. You see a lot of people of color in the younger ranks, but it’s hard to move up."

"I think there’s been a tendency for people to conflate my characters with my personality. … I wrote 24 episodes of The Office. That’s more than any other person on The Office, but no one can really picture me sitting and doing the hard work of writing the episodes."

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

"I could really relate to [Never Have I Ever], more than anything else that I’ve ever written. I was personally proud of it, but didn’t know how it would be received. And to this day, I think it’s my biggest success in terms of how many people it reached and how popular it was on Netflix. I learned a lesson from it, which is not to be cynical about the public."

"I'm going to gently assume that if you're reading this book, you are a little bit of a nerd, or perhaps you're a man whose nerd girlfriend is taking a long time in the bathroom and you can't figure out how to turn on her television."

"I’m surprised when I remember that, physically, I resemble most women in this country. In the United States, a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches and a size 10 is probably more common than virtually any other body type. But somehow when she is on-screen it’s shocking to people, almost as shocking as seeing a married couple on TV where the man and woman are roughly the same age."

"I would go to where [famous comedians] were, with an enormous tape recorder from the AV squad, and I would lie and say it was a real radio station. And when I got there, a child … had just shown up, and they would realize they got duped. But, they would talk to me anyway because they were really nice. And I would just say to Seinfeld, "How do you write a joke?" And I would force him to walk me through it. Or, I interviewed Harold Ramis: "How do you write a movie?" And those interviews changed my life because they really told me. It was my college. I had my college [education] in junior [year] of high school. I was just so obsessed, so I thought, "I'm gonna try to interview every original writer from Saturday Night Live. So, I interviewed Al Franken and Tom Davis and—. … What would happen is someone would be nice—like Alan Zweibel. I'd interview him and he would take out the phonebook and say, "I'm gonna hook you up with this person," and he would start giving me all the phone numbers. And I was obsessive. I was always trying to get Andy Kaufman, but … at the time he was always down south wrestling. And I would call his management office and they'd say, "We don't even know where he is.""

"I think there will always be a double standard between males and females, so I think that an actress is more likely to protect her public persona, so to speak, than an actor would be."

"People have interpretations of what you're supposed to be like. If you're unattractive and overweight, you must have a great personality. If you're attractive, then you must not be the nicest person. People are always taken aback that I'm easygoing but not necessarily stupid."

"I turned to my kids and I was like, ‘You are half-Ukrainian, half-American!’ I literally was like, ‘Look, you!’ And my kids were like, ‘Yeah mom, I get it.’ And I was like, ‘No! You are Ukrainian and American.’ I was like, ‘You are half-Iowa, half-Ukraine.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, I get it. It’s been irrelevant to me that I come from Ukraine. It never mattered. So much so that I’ve always said I’m Russian, right? Like I’ve always been, ‘I’m from Russia’ for a multitude of reasons…"

"I very much have always felt like an American… People were like, ‘Oh, you’re so Eastern European.’ I was like, ‘I’m so L.A.!"

"I feel like every role you take, there's a part of you that obviously feels like you can do it. I don't know if perfect is the right word because I don't believe in perfection. I don't think it exists."

"It's all perspective. Your version of normal and my version of normal is different. My kids' version of normal is incredibly different. So it's perspective. You try to surround them with diversity. We try to surround ourselves with all aspects of life and try not to stay in our bubble, but it's hard. It is really hard! And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying."

"I don’t think that we need to consider the people of Russia an enemy. I do really want to emphasize that. I don’t think that that’s being said enough in the press. I think that there’s now ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mentality. And I don’t want people to conflate the two problems that are happening. I don’t think it’s the people of Russia… I do encourage people to look at it from the perspective of, ‘It’s the people in power, not the people themselves’."

"I would say that by third grade I spoke pretty fluent English. I don't remember much of second grade. I've said this before. I was not a traumatized kid, by any means with the way that this might come out, but I pretty much blocked out all of second grade in the states. I'm guessing it was because it was hard and my parents said that I came home crying every night but I don't remember it. I think it was rough because I just didn't know where I was and I didn't get the culture. I didn't get the people. I'll be honest, I never...I met an African American person for the first time in my life when I was seven. I didn't know they existed. I didn't know there were people of a different color. I didn't know people with red hair existed. It wasn't even...it wasn't because I wasn't taught that in school but I think it just wasn't where I grew up. So much of it was, forget the language barrier, just a culture shock. I think adapting to the culture was much harder than actually learning English."

"I didn't fail out. I dropped out. I did not fail. I was actually a pretty good student. My problem was that I didn't know what I wanted to study. What was I going to go in? Undecided? I took a class on Zionist theory. I took classes that interested me, that weren't necessarily for a specific degree. Then I realized and spoke to my parents and I said, 'I do love what I do and I want to pursue it.' They were like, 'Oh, why don't you just drop out.'"

"You want to be honest with a character and play it truthfully, and you want to be genuine with your character."

"I don’t wear makeup. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something that I associate with myself. I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it’s ­beautiful. I’m just not that person. So to go to a shoot and have my makeup artist put on face cream and send me off to do a photo, I was like, “Well, this makes life easy.”"

"That is the biggest form of bullying ever, the paparazzi. Printing lies, making accusations, it's just bullying."

"Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society."

"And I also don’t want people to get discouraged and conflate different issues in the world, and I don’t want people to compare. I think that one thing that’s happening a little bit that I’ve noticed is people are like, ‘Why is everybody paying attention to this problem, but nobody paid attention to all these other issues that have been happening?’ And I don’t want people to conflate. Like everyone, people just to focus on what is at hand right now and right now this issue can get incredibly catastrophic for the rest of the world – not just for that part of the world, and I don’t want people to lose sight of that."

"Comedy is very hard and I don't know if it's where my heart necessarily is but doing comedy is one of those things where if something is funny right now does not necessarily mean it's going to sustain itself for a year in production and be funny when the movie comes out and that to me is the hardest thing. I love playing different characters and I love doing fun things and I love to entertain people, whether that be in a comedy or a drama. If I get you to laugh or I get you to cry I'm super stoked, as morbid as that might sound."

"I think anyone who at 26 is going to attempt to be a professional ballerina is going to physically kill themselves. Baths are what I looked forward to, every single night! And a glass of wine!"

"I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70's', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70's and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore. So my attempt at college failed miserably and I dropped out and decided that this is what I wanted to do for a living. When I made that decision I had to convince myself to disassociate myself from the industry, if that makes any sense, to be who I am and to have this just be what I do and that the paths could never cross. If they did then I think that given after '70's it was like a good year of just pure rejection. So if I didn't disassociate myself from what I did I would probably go through depression, I would assume, or go through some hard times. But I didn't and I always had some other things that were more important to me. I had family that was more important. I had my life that was more important. I had hobbies that were more important and this was just my job."

"From every film you learn something new, but from my experience you never know what film is going to open what doors, and it always happens when you least expect it."

"The desire to be perfect. Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves."

"Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape."