Quotes from Shonda Rhimes

Mother is a verb, not a noun.

I've learned this is a very long marriage doing a television show. I like the people that I work with to be people I enjoy, so you want to cast people who are as excited and enthusiastic as you are.

No is a powerful word. To me, it's the single most powerful word in the English language. Said clearly, strongly and with enough frequency and force, it can alter the course of history.

You can't tell stories and really walk in someone's shoes and not have a love for them, even if they're doing horrible things.

There's racist casting, and there is normal casting. Normal casting, to me, is a process that strives for representation and, in many cases, strives to simply portray the world as it actually is instead of as falsely non-inclusive. And sadly, sometimes that involves removing the whitewash that exists on history.

I actually really love Twitter - I used to feel angry and insulted when people criticised me or the shows, but now I don't take it too seriously. What I do love is that there's this great direct line to fans.

It's important to have people who are absolutely willing to say you're wrong or who have a totally different perspective than you do on everything. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, and good ones are even harder.

I like people with their own opinions, and I like people who argue with me. It's very exhausting to be in a room full of people who just nod and smile.

When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyonce. And it is all of those things at the same time.

In my house, you got in trouble if you didn't speak up. My mom would be furious at us if we went to school and behaved nicely if someone treated us badly. If we got in trouble because we had yelled at them or told them that they were wrong, my mother would be like, 'Good job.'

I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I'm doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.

No matter how you feel about social media, you can't deny the giant that is Facebook.

Most writing staffs have this crazy high turnover, and then everyone's really miserable, and I don't understand that. I don't know why you don't grow people to then be able to take over as you. That's how I can have more shows.

I learned how to write TV by writing 'Grey's Anatomy.'

There is no longer one way to consume TV. Some shows you want to watch live, some shows you only discover through streaming, some shows you just feel you need to DVR.

This is going to sound crazy, but there was a period of time where on TLC they would show those surgeries - like a woman had a 90-pound tumor, or they separated these twins. And my sister and I - she lived in Ohio when I lived in California - would watch them together on the phone.

'Scandal' has always lived in this dark place with this idea that Washington is filled with this underbelly of monsters, that if the real world understood how dark, twisted and corrupt it really was, they would never agree with our government or want to be part of it. It's been kind of fun to live in that world. It felt like a fictional world.

A hashtag is not a movement.

A woman who doesn't want to have kids is sort of a mystery to people. That's a question they're asked the minute they get married, it's a question they're asked constantly, 'Don't you want to have kids?' And I feel like that's completely unfair.

You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.

I always like to say our shows should be something that, you know, before 10 o'clock, if your kid wanders into the room, they should be able to glance at the TV, watch what's happening, but not quite know what's happening. That's always my standard.

I don't ever approach anything from the issue first, so I can't tell you that I've thought about tackling universal health care. I'd have to have some great story I'd want to tell, and then universal health care would become part of the way to tell that story.

'Grey's' has this universal, global thing to it. It works all over the world.

Most of the women I saw on TV didn't seem like people I actually knew. They felt like ideas of what women are.