Laeta Kalogridis

“The intersection of being female and a showrunner carries difficult challenges.”

“'The Handmaid's Tale' is not a book or show advocating enslaving women or creating a theocracy. It's not glorifying that. It's talking about what happens if that happens.”

“To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.”

“I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out, 'Gosh, I wonder how guys feel,' because most every piece of art I look at invites me into that experience.”

“The world that we live in isn't uniform-looking, and the future that we're headed toward isn't uniform-looking.”

“Don't worry about what happens when things go wrong; just accept that they're going to, and figure out how do you want to cope with it when it does.”

“Violence in drama is an external contextualization of internal conflicts.”

“Iconic jobs are interesting to deconstruct through therapy.”

“There was a brief period in college where I flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer because my father was one. But I was cured of it rather swiftly.”

“I just never count on anything. You can't.”

“It's always fair to criticize, to question, to engage about things like whitewashing and violence against women and choices of lack of diversity. All those things are really, really a good thing to talk about.”

“All of us in the modern world are constructing our identities, largely through social media, for a larger audience.”

“There are certain expectations placed on writers if other people have put a value on their gender. I'm aware of the hundreds of tiny differences that happen when people are seeing your gender before they see something else.”

“All the science fiction I loved as a kid was holding up a mirror to society and warning us about the need for course correction.”

“The range of my interests in science fiction - it really does run a gamut.”

“When I was a kid, my grandparents were Greek immigrants on my father's side. My grandfather used to read me Greek myths, in which there are a great many goddesses and stories of strong women. And I was entranced by them. Then I started reading science fiction very young, and I loved it.”

“This kind of art - the dystopic future kind of art - is designed to make you uncomfortable.”

“Of course I worry about whitewashing, and I feel very strongly that whitewashing was, is, and continues to be a problem in entertainment.”

“When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.”

“It was very, very important to me to represent a broader swath of humanity that often isn't seen in futuristic sci-fi.”