Callie Khouri Quotes

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

Researching real people and doing them, I think, is harder than anything else. You don't want to do a caricature of them and you don't want to do an impression. You just want to do the best you can, in terms of presenting their views and a general impression of the guy. That's the hardest thing to do, real people.

In all my shows, I'm not interested in the iconic shots of the Capitol and the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I'm always interested in trying to get the culture of the place - trying to get it right.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

I enjoy taking on complex, difficult characters and have always striven to capture the truth of those people, whether or not it's popular.

For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong.

It is shocking that the screen does not reflect the way the world is and the diversity in the world... What the world really looks like should be on screen, and it isn't.

One of the great things about 'Girls' is that each of these characters really does represent a human being. There are definitely relatable aspects to all of these folks, and certainly within my close friend group, those personalities very much exist.

My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

There are different types of experiences, and all of them are valid, and all of them deserve to be portrayed in a real way.

Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?

Casting plus size girls needs to be genuine.

Women should be portrayed as they are, authentically and truthfully.

Sometimes when I travel, I like to find things that relate to where I am.

I think it's really important that we see women represented properly in TV, and that's a multi-dimensional person: a real human being who's flawed, who's weird, who's awesome.

Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'

I want to watch telly that reflects the world I see.

The Bay, they got their own sound, they don't try to be like nobody. They smooth out there.

How many shows on TV do you see young black people, both women and men, really embody a full-fledged human being, flaws and all?

For me to play any true person in a film based on a true story, I always want to make sure that it doesn't mock and it certainly doesn't trivialize the events that took place.

When I was in high school, there weren't a lot of out gay actors playing gay roles. I didn't see myself represented truthfully in the media.

I don't think 'Euphoria' can capture the entirety of the teen-in-high-school experience, but I think it is realistic. It's scary in that sense because I don't think we get to see a lot of depictions of high school this raw. I think that truth might scare people.