As much as possible, I put my family first.
I'm always going for truth and honesty.
I'm embarrassed that people will know that I can't ride a bicycle. For years, I have been feigning bad ankles and saying I wasn't in the mood for a bike ride.
Some of you guys are going to boo, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't like dogs.
I took all my TV experience and what I learned about - by writing and directing and bringing a movie to Sundance - about the realities of the independent film market: 'Transparent' is the marriage of those two situations.
I guess a show like 'Entourage' would be wish fulfillment, right? But 'Entourage' is wish fulfillment for men. It's that you can be kind of schlumpy-looking and have access to someone famous and find yourself at a pool party surrounded by girls in bikinis.
All writing is propaganda for the self.
I've noticed that women are always punished for their sexuality in popular culture.
The inbox is always open in my brain, and anyone can get in any time and access me. Turning it off is taking back control. I decide who gets in. It's about emotional privacy, having a self.
I was the kind of Jew who'd be in a bar, somebody would say it's Yom Kippur, and I'd go, 'Really?'
At East Side Jews, we can take a risk because it isn't all about the rules. I started it to create a space for all those people who wouldn't go to temple because they were scared of getting the rules wrong.
From the moment you say 'action,' this is the fun part - things should happen that surprise you, excite you, scare you, turn you on, make you laugh. If things aren't surprising you, when you say 'cut,' whisper things to the actors that will make them do things that do surprise you.
I've been writing about misogyny for 20 years and trying to understand what femininity means for my entire career.
Whether you're writing television or movies, at some point you're going to encounter a male executive or investor who's going to say, 'I don't like that woman. She's unlikable.' And often, it's literally for being a regular human woman as opposed to an attracting human woman.
I love the Army-Navy surplus store Surplus Value Center. They have really good long underwear and multicolored bandanas, cool camo jackets, and really, really scary-looking knives. If you're into that sort of thing.
I've always been really interested in secrets - how people find ways of doing things without telling anyone else in order to keep themselves feeling safe in the world.
I noticed that people were craving a way of reinterpreting tradition and of being Jewish without joining a synagogue.
I really relate to the feeling of falling in love 10 times a day and wishing I could never stop falling in love.
It's hard enough to be a lady writer. Doubly hard to be a funny lady writer.
Every project is a race between your enthusiasm and your ability to get it done. Go fast. Don't slow down. A year from now, new things will interest you.
I'm a fan of Louis C.K., I'm a fan of Lena Dunham. I love shows about people that other people would consider unlikable, or, like, the work of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks.
Something I've really been wanting to do, ever since 'Six Feet Under' ended, was create my own version of this idealized writer's room as well as the ideal family.
I wouldn't necessarily say that 'Alpha House' or 'Betas' embodied a particular vision of Amazon of the kind of brand or programming they were gonna do. I think those were the first lucky creators who hit it right for them.
It's a struggle every day to get people to invest financially in portrayals of women that aren't satisfying to straight white men.
Guys, there's only one thing I hate more than bloggers who start sentences with 'guys' - and it's those mealy-mouth hipsters who crochet codpieces and their ye-olde-sideburned friends who pickle stuff and slaughter their own gluten-free goats.
My purpose as an artist is to heal the divided feminine in our culture. Well, okay wait, that sounds incredibly cheesy and like something a massage therapist might do at Esalen.
Normally, you cast a pilot, and you have to make compromises about being political about who you cast.
Being pretty... I'm just confused about it. I mean, I love getting my nails done, but I also like dressing like a boy. I think I feel most myself when I'm mixing femininity and masculinity. Like, fifty-fifty.
I really feel like becoming a director came from other women saying, 'Yeah, you can do this.' I wanted to direct 'Six Feet Under,' and no, they didn't let me.
Normally, I think the people you would use on your first film, it would be a real struggle to bring them with you onto your television show. I just brought every single person with and expanded my little indie film world.
I love TV, I love writing, but I love movements more.
Most people privilege the technology, almost as if actors are in service to the machine.
I think I've always had that struggle my whole life, of feeling a little bit more gender-neutral, feeling more comfortable as a creative person when I'm dressed like a boy, when I'm dressed more masculine.
I don't think it's a contradiction to find painfulness funny.
You just have to say over and over again: 'I am a director.' Nobody gives it to you. Nobody anoints you.
I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'
We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly.
I'm constantly confused about how to dress.
If you're in a room and can be seen by actors, you need to understand that you can be felt by them.
We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.
I'm a minimalist Jew, but on Friday night, I celebrate Shabbat. At sundown, we light candles, say the blessing, and I don't turn on my computer for 24 hours.
If you're female, and you want to express your femininity, you're actually demonized in the 'Free To Be... You And Me' generation.
It's really easy to be funny. You get a lot of funny people in a room, the show is funny.
People who don't have experience setting healthy boundaries, they have secrets instead.
I think, because of the Internet, we're not looking at the very, very narrow channels for distribution that there used to be.
I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.
Perfection would be something that you see in 'Architectural Digest.'
For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'
I used to think that, when I was a director, I would have a very specific vision of what everything would look like, but now I am more of a camp counselor.
