I had a lot of college debt. It's very difficult to go to a university that is as expensive as Stanford and then blindly follow your passions when they don't immediately make money out of the gate.

No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.

Part of what you try and do when you're writing is to just transcend politics and the moment in a way and talk about something, those fundamental building blocks of building nature.

Another writer might question whether you're feeling competitive. But if I talk to Jonah, I know that he truly values my success more than his own. And I truly value his success more than my own. There's a generosity there.

We subverted the entire premise of 'Westworld' in that our sympathies are meant to be with the robots, the hosts.

I was actually born a robot, so 'Westworld' is just autobiographical.

But I'm the child of a tiger mom.

I didn't need a harassment scandal to break out in Hollywood or misogynistic people in government to know they exist. Anybody who's a woman, a minority, or a thinking, perceiving male can see that it exists.

For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you're choosing that people don't consciously pick up on, but that they feel.

You have to be very specific with the suggestions of how you want to show things, not just with dialogue but also place and mood. I write all of that as very vivid guidelines so directors can come in and do what they will with them.

A lot of times, people say, 'My work didn't suffer with family.' I would go a step further: My career only flourished upon having children. It got better.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

Feeling trapped in identity isn't just the purview of women and minorities.

You know, both my parents aren't really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it's how I make a living.

How many of us have these demons or habits or things we don't like about ourselves and understand the loops that we're in and yet are unable to break out of them and create lasting change within ourselves?

I've tried to always be incredibly overprepared in everything that I've done.

What's so bad about Google knowing I need Kleenex? Look at it in the aggregate - see how information... can be used to target people based on their profiles and change the course of human history, as I believe it is already beginning to do. This knowledge that I need Kleenex has bigger complications than just needing Kleenex.

The sad thing is I don't think I've seen 'Jurassic Park.' Not that it's not an amazing movie, I literally didn't watch film or TV until I was 23 or something.

And I think the greatest danger that AI poses isn't so much these anthropomorphic beings who look like us and are beguiling are going to fool us. It's the fact that a intelligence without a body or corporeal form will fool us into trusting it with data, which we seem to think is... it has no repercussions.

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

I wanted to go to Harvard because it felt like it would be the Hogwarts Academy of law schools.

Since time immemorial we've explored these ideas of tragedy, the things people do for love, the great weight that occurs when love is taken away and the great length and the heroism that people will exhibit to fight for the ones that they love.

For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.

The reality is that 'Westworld' is designed so that guests can indulge with impunity their every fantasy - be it light or dark. So the hosts experience the extremes in human behavior, good and bad.