Jenji Kohan Quotes

Home is where your family is. Wherever you are, it's about the people you're surrounded by, not necessarily where you lay your head.

I think shows that are completely dramatic are a lie. People use humor to cope. That is how we deal with things. In the darkest situations, there's humor. And if you don't show that, you're not being true to real life.

I don't set out to write female lead shows, necessarily. I like deeply flawed characters. When they come to me, or when I'm introduced to them, I follow the stories and the people, rather than setting out to do a female lead thing.

I'm always looking for a nexus, where you can put all these diverse people together, see how they respond to one another, see what they learn about each other, and what they like and don't like.

We're also talking a lot in the room about planting seeds that can grow over the course of the season, knowing that people might be watching them in bulk. We'd like to bury some Easter eggs and let people find them, later on.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

We still have this prudish, puritanical culture, but we also have so little exposure to a diversity of bodies. Bodies are beautiful and great and compelling.

We fell in love with different people. Looking back, we might have done it in a different order, but we got invested. We really wanted to do the flashbacks because we wanted to explore who these women were on the outside versus the inside, and get a fuller picture of the masks we wear.

I think a good story, well told is a good story, well told, whether you're watching the episodes all in a row or not. However, it might be fun to take a closer look at how the previous episode ends and how that end relates to the beginning of the next episode.

I'm from the creative side of Hollywood. I'm up for anyone that wants to support my work. If you have eyeballs and give me a budget and are nice to me, I'm in.

I'm a huge Ira Glass fan; I'm a huge fan of radio in general.

I'm not a public figure; I shouldn't have to be held to a certain standard of beauty.

First of all, I find everything funny, which is upsetting to my children sometimes, and to people in my life, in general.

Mainly, I'm doing my thing, and I hope people like it. I don't say, 'I'm going to write something radical and hope it reverberates throughout society.' The goal is to write a solid, entertaining, engaging show.

I'm always looking for those places where you can slam really disparate people up against one another, and they have to deal with each other. There are very few crossroads anymore. We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it's a mosaic. There's all these pieces, they're next to each other, they're not necessarily mixing. And I'm looking for those spaces where people actually do mix.

You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up.

I can shoot off my big mouth and write my shows and run my shows, and I can recognize how lucky I am because my position is rare and my position is privileged.

I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I'd spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.

I think my immediate reaction was, "I'm so tired. I need a little more time." But, it was very quickly followed up by excitement. It's very flattering, and it's a wonderful vote of confidence. We dream of getting to do what we do.

I remember one of my writers on 'Weeds' got a new apartment and didn't get cable or a dish. He just hooked his computer up to the TV. I was like, 'This is it. This is how it's happening.'

If you go to a network and say, "I wanna do prison stories about black women and Latino women and old women," you're not gonna make a sale. But, if you've got this blonde girl going to prison, you can get in there, and then you can tell all the stories. I just thought it was a terrific gateway drug into all the things I wanted to get into.

Personally, I like to yearn a little and long for the next episode. On the other hand, I'm also a glutton. My kids love to dive in and eat whole series at once.

In my head I'm a rapper, but I'm not!

On the other hand, we worked a year on this and some people are going to watch it in a night and go, "We want more!" And there is something I miss about the longing and the anticipation for the next episode.

My ex-boyfriend said, 'You have a better chance of getting elected to Congress than getting on the staff of a television show.' Which was the perfect thing for him to say, because my entire career is, 'Well, screw you.' And we broke up.

I am a huge, huge Regina Spektor fan.

I think great writers should write great shows, and I have trouble with, like, what you are in life shouldn't automatically make you what you do in your art. It doesn't necessarily translate.

To be able to be there first, I love the pioneer thing. It's exciting to me. And they pay full rate, they're really nice, they support the work, and they said yes. What could be bad? It's the Wild West. You can do what you want.