Jenji Kohan

“My first job is to entertain, but if, while you're enjoying, you start to question something you never thought about before or empathize with, relate to, love someone you only thought of as 'other' once upon a time - how awesome is that.”

“I don't set out to write female lead shows, necessarily. I like deeply flawed characters. When they come to me, or when I'm introduced to them, I follow the stories and the people, rather than setting out to do a female lead thing.”

“For a lot of people, film is still the dream - the captive audience in the darkened theater - but I love TV. I think it's fantastic.”

“I think shows that are completely dramatic are a lie. People use humor to cope. That is how we deal with things. In the darkest situations, there's humor. And if you don't show that, you're not being true to real life.”

“I am a huge, huge Regina Spektor fan.”

“I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I'd spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.”

“I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.”

“In my head I'm a rapper, but I'm not!”

“My ex-boyfriend said, 'You have a better chance of getting elected to Congress than getting on the staff of a television show.' Which was the perfect thing for him to say, because my entire career is, 'Well, screw you.' And we broke up.”

“There's more to us than the moment we made a bad decision.”

“Home is where your family is. Wherever you are, it's about the people you're surrounded by, not necessarily where you lay your head.”

“We still have this prudish, puritanical culture, but we also have so little exposure to a diversity of bodies. Bodies are beautiful and great and compelling.”

“What offends me more than something sexist is something poorly written or unfunny or cliched.”

“By nature, I sit alone in a room and type... My goal was never celebrity.”

“I believe in the power of media. I really do. It's my soapbox. And I do have an agenda, because I'm enraged by the limitations forced on people - by poverty, oppression, hatred, fear - and I'm saddened by the kind of loss we all experienced due to the contributions that people cannot make because of their circumstances.”

“I remember one of my writers on 'Weeds' got a new apartment and didn't get cable or a dish. He just hooked his computer up to the TV. I was like, 'This is it. This is how it's happening.'”

“I'm a huge Ira Glass fan; I'm a huge fan of radio in general.”

“A TV touchstone for me is 'The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.' That series was whimsical and smart and had the mix of comedy and drama that I now trade in - but with a dash of magical realism. I wanted to be Molly Dodd, but more than that, I wanted to be Jay Tarses, who created the show.”

“'Be nice' is my family's basic rule but one that often goes unfollowed in Hollywood. There's always a moment when you can choose between being snarky and being kind. I opt for the latter - it's much less exhausting!”

“I think great writers should write great shows, and I have trouble with, like, what you are in life shouldn't automatically make you what you do in your art. It doesn't necessarily translate.”