Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.

Part of making TV is the process - you just have to churn it out.

Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores.

The networks have a particular agenda, a particular model and structure. It doesn't have anything to do with content. This is not a dis on them - they are a business model, run by business people.

In TV, there's so much compromise, it does start to grate a bit. But if you're a writer or an actor, it really is the place to be.

There's a lot of anger in the Twitter-verse, as I've discovered. But there's a lot of love.

I'm never interested in movies where you don't care about the people you're watching, and that's my biggest quibble about horror, that kids have gotten stupider and stupider.

I am not a fan of referencing your own work when it's in a different universe than what you're doing. That, to me, is a wink at the audience, and winking isn't actually cool when you're not, like, 10.

You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.

I don't believe in creating exclusionary art.

Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.

It's not any huge secret that I'm an atheist.

You can't be a storyteller and a speechwriter at the same time.

I think to an extent every human being needs to be redeemed somewhat or at least needs to look at themselves and say, 'I've made mistakes, I'm off course, I need to change.' Which is probably the hardest thing for a human being to do, and maybe that's why it interests me so.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

I always watch what I say. I am what I say.

I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of 'women are inferior.'

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

Every time you work on a project, it's a little vacation from the project you're working on the other 23 hours. That's the thing - it replenishes you to do something else.

Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.

I think 'Batman Begins' is certainly my favorite Batman movie I've seen.

I don't know a lot of show runners. I mean I met a lot of them in picket lines. I'm not part of a, like, secret society or pickup basketball game. As far as I'm concerned, pick-up basketball games are secret societies. They confuse me. I've never been a networker or I've never been very social.

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.