Quotes from Mike White

'Girls' is a huge show, as far as buzz, and magazine covers, and getting a ton of copy, and awards. And yet I don't think the viewership is huge.

As an actor and a writer, the anxiety about doing TV is that you start to feel like you get married to one tone or one kind of idea and you feel like you want to be able to express a lot of different things.

People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there's a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.

There's something very touching to me about someone almost communicating to themselves in some way - trying to come to some deeper understanding of yourself and having compassion for yourself.

It's fun when you create a world to inhabit it and see the other characters from grounds eye view.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

Yeah, it's disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

I remember I grew up in Pasadena in a very, kind of, homogeneous, kind of, suburban existence and then I went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And there were all these, kind of, hipster New York kids who were so-called 'cultured' and had so much, you know, like knew all the references and, like, already had their look down.

Production for movies or TV is very painstaking and slow.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

I just think there are certain men who feel like engaging in a story told from a female point of view is somehow a feminizing experience. And that itself is something that they're almost supposed to not want to engage.

As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture.

It's fun as a creator to make something that allows multiple interpretations.

The purpose of making people feel uncomfortable is to play with their preconceptions.

I can be really annoying, but I also feel like I'm a nice person.

To me, this is from a Buddhist perspective or whatever, sometimes people who are working out their political beliefs, they can rage against the man, and yet at the same time can be oblivious to their own way of stepping on the foot of the person right next to them.

You watch stuff like 'The Real Housewives' and you start to think, 'We're all so vacuous! Is there any nobility to any of these people?' But then you look out into the world, and there are people who are doing cool stuff with their lives.

You want to work with people who you like and have an easy rapport with.

I think movie sets can often be stressful, and people take themselves very seriously.

I don't even give my scripts to friends because I just feel it's, like, I don't need one more set of opinions.

I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.