Lisa Joy

“At first, 'Westworld' was a project we had declined to do.”

“The appealing thing to me about Wonder Woman is the question of, who is this woman in tights and leotard walking around? What's her story and how does it resonate with women today?”

“In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.”

“Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I'd wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I'd sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.”

“For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.”

“I do love Westerns. But, in a way, traditional Westerns, for me, have been hard to love viscerally and personally.”

“But I'm the child of a tiger mom.”

“But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.”

“One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not.”

“There are no coincidences in 'Westworld.'”

“Fiction has always been a way of examining society and its flaws and trying to expose them.”

“In 'Lost,' they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. And that's absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.”

“I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.”

“The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not 'dream big,' but strive big.”

“No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.”

“I've always had a problem with over-identification with inanimate objects.”

“Feeling trapped in identity isn't just the purview of women and minorities.”

“You know, both my parents aren't really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it's how I make a living.”

“Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there's a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can't get rid of violence.”

“I didn't need a harassment scandal to break out in Hollywood or misogynistic people in government to know they exist. Anybody who's a woman, a minority, or a thinking, perceiving male can see that it exists.”