Quotes from Lisa Joy

There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I'd wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I'd sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.

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.

I feel like there is just never a good time for taking a chance and following your dreams - whatever those dreams are.

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.

I've always been fascinated by memory and I remember Jonah, when we first started dating, was working on something involving memory. It was early on in our relationship and I was like, damn it, I wanted to do a movie on memory. That was 'Memento.'

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.

I've been looking for a superhero I could tune into and relate to for years, and when nobody stepped in to take the place of 'Buffy' in my poor soul, I thought, 'Maybe I can create somebody!' That's how 'Headache' came to be.

But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.

Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there's a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can't get rid of violence.

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?

In 'Lost,' they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. And that's absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.

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.

Holding women to the idea of 'write what you know' subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it's also a chance to celebrate who we could be.

You see in moments of duress not only the darkest parts of human nature but also the brightest, the most noble.

And nowadays, the idea of AI is not really science fiction anymore - it's just science fact.

We can understand both our nature and our nurture, but understanding is only the first step.

I've always had a problem with over-identification with inanimate objects.

I personally am not so obsessed about immortality for myself. The human body has been designed that way, obsolescence is OK.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.

The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not 'dream big,' but strive big.

America is built on the labors of the oppressed.

I would say that, between us, I tend to be a little bit more philosophically optimistic. Jonah, I think he sees things as more finite.