Quotes from Julie Plec

I read 'Tiger Beat' and 'Bop' from the time I was 9, 10, 11 years old. I loved movies. I saw 'E.T.' seven times. I used to yell at people who called me when 'L.A. Law' was on because they should know better. So I just have been so in love with the business of Hollywood since I can remember.

I call it 'The Breakfast Club' philosophy. There's something about being trapped in a dire situation with a group of people that you would never normally be trapped with.

I look at 'Friday Night Lights' as one of my all-time favorite series finales, and that is what you want. After all the roads you've traveled with these people, you just want to know that they're going to be happy. I'm a big believer in shows that make that choice.

I used to sneak 'General Hospital' when I was a kid. My cousin was my babysitter, and she watched it, so I got hooked on it. I wasn't supposed to be watching it, but I was so obsessed with it that I'd find ways, even as an 8-year-old, to get into that.

Speaking only for myself, the ideal finale to me is 'Friday Night Lights,' where you have loved and worshipped a show for all these years, you get to come back, celebrate the characters, finish up their journeys, and send everyone out with a feeling of, 'My God, I'm so grateful that I got to know these people.'

There's a lot of storylines over the years where you feel like it's maybe meant to be more important than it ends up being, and that's because we jump ship, and you gracefully extricate yourself from that as well as you can.

I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.

As you live your life and accumulate friends, both IRL and on social media, ask yourself, are you a bully too?

Daily, I visualize the smart-ass troll who lives deep in my subconscious, and I pelt him with rainbows and unicorns. I fight a battle against my judgmental thoughts. And when an opportunity arises to gain acceptance or popularity at the expense of someone else, I zip it. It's not easy.

I've always loved the genre of virus movies or Armageddon movies - anything that involves being trapped with the cute boy in detention when the zombies are attacking.

Of every movie that I've seen multiple times, of every TV show that I was obsessed with, I don't think I was ever obsessed with anything more than 'Flowers in the Attic,' which I read 13 times between fourth grade and senior year.

Write something good that the people like.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.

There's something about two people coming together in the rain that is the ultimate expression of love in the minds of most audiences, I guess.

When you have to spread heroism across too many players, you don't get to really dig deep into each of them as much as you'd want to.

There is no definitive end to anybody's story when you're dealing with the fluidity of chemistry, because when it gets stale, you want out.

It doesn't matter if these characters are supposed to be together forever: if their chemistry gets stale, you want somebody to die, you want to put somebody in a coma, you want to write them off the show - anything to save you.

God bless Hollywood and all that it stands for, but, you know, people tend to peak in their 40s, and then it's all downhill from there.

There's something about a supernatural universe that you would think would actually make it easier to create tension and build conflict and have big scares and big ideas and big sequences. And that's true in a lot of ways. You can pick the best idea out of a hat.

I thought, 'Oh, I'll be an independent producer. Oh, I'll be a manager.' I was going through all those things in my head, and one night, late at night, I was having what I would now describe as probably a panic attack because there were so many unknowns. An almost literal voice came into my head telling me, 'You need to write.'

If I walk into the editing room, it's six hours lost. I'm massaging frames. I'm, like, 'Oh, take six frames off that shot. Hit the music cue right there.' I will drive everybody crazy if left to my own devices in that room. So I try to do everything I can by staying out of the way.

When you're the showrunner, you're the person that's in control of most of the details, and to be able to take all that and then to step right behind the camera and to have a direct line of communication with the crew and with the actors - to not be delivering that through another person - is pretty freeing and extremely stimulating.

I always talk about Meredith and Derrick from 'Grey's Anatomy,' and I loved them the most when they sort of opened and closed each episode with them in bed, happy with each other, and you didn't need to insert extra conflict into them, because there was plenty of conflict in the show. So they were this port in the storm of conflict.