A biography for Shonda Rhimeshasn’t been written yet.
“I have all these friends who just love therapy, and I always say the reason that I'm absolutely not in therapy is because then I wouldn't have anything to write.”
“I believe that good television should be challenging and frustrating and maddening and thrilling. If you just want to see people who look like you and think like you and do what you would do in any given situation, you'd have to stop looking at TV and start looking in a mirror. But would that be as much fun?”
“I've been a writer since I was a kid. I've been a writer since I was, you know, dictating stories into a tape deck and trying to get my mom to type them up - when I was really, really little.”
“I think the point of our country, our planet, the reason we're all here, one of the best things that we can do is be concerned about something even when it doesn't concern us. That's the whole point.”
“When you help make people healthier, it makes the nation healthier; it makes the world healthier. It makes the economy healthier.”
“The way I write my shows, every character is its own organic thing. No character has a life at all until I see it played by somebody.”
“A hashtag is not a movement.”
“Writing for television is completely different from movie scriptwriting. A movie is all about the director's vision, but television is a writer's medium.”
“I'm one of those people, since I was 5, I could tell you I was going to have kids. I could tell you I was going to have three. I could tell you they were going to be girls. But I have never wanted to get married. I never played bride. I was never interested. I don't know what it is; I never wanted to get married.”
“I don't think of myself as a television producer. Obviously, that's crazy. Because I should. That's what I do. But I don't actually see that as my job. It's why my business cards say 'storyteller.'”
“My parents are professors; they're intellectual. I spent a lot of time reading books. To me, everyone always looks like they do in your imagination. And in my imagination, the characters always looked like me.”
“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.”
“Calling a show a 'guilty pleasure' is like saying 'I'm embarrassed to say I watch it but I can't stop.' That's not a compliment.”
“You have to have more people who don't look like you in the writers room. I try to have some people who don't look like me in my writers room. I think it's important to have a group of voices, of people who can dissent.”
“My 15-year-old threw open the door the other day to my room and screamed, ''Freaks and Geeks' only has one season? Can they make another one?' And I tried to explain to her that it happened a long time ago. She didn't understand that because it felt very relevant to her.”
“I truly feel like my job is to make the shows. That's what I'm paid to do. It's somebody else's job to market them, and it's somebody else's job to pay attention to the ratings, because if I paid attention to all that, my head would explode.”
“There are stories to be told that are still untold and characters to be portrayed that haven't been portrayed correctly. So there's work to be done.”
“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 am never worried that I'm not gonna get my work done. I was the kid who got straight As and was a little too intense in school. Like, I am a perfectionist, and I am going to sit at the front of the class with my hand raised.”
“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.”