Jenji Kohan Quotations

Mainly, I'm doing my thing, and I hope people like it. I don't say, 'I'm going to write something radical and hope it reverberates throughout society.' The goal is to write a solid, entertaining, engaging show.

She's trying to maintain the trappings of what a happy family and happy lifestyle looks like and taking big risks for it. But we're living in the most material time ever. Things tend to take on a lot greater importance these days. Can't be happy without your stuff.

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.

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.

Pot is a vehicle for the show. It's so in the zeitgeist. It's talked about in the news, in the courts. It's a morally ambiguous narcotic (and) the universal rebellion drug.

I am a huge, huge Regina Spektor fan.

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

It can go two ways with girls: They either bond or eat each other alive.

I think what strikes a chord is, this is a mother. She has children and she's doing something illegal. We have a history of the father doing what he needs to do to support his family. Mommy is not supposed to take these kinds of risks. She's supposed to be at home nurturing. But I guess you weigh your options and do what you think is gonna work.

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 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.

When I got out of college in 1991, I had four jobs in four different parts of L.A. There was I Love Juicy, a smoothie bar in Venice, and the Videotheque on Sunset Boulevard, across from the old Tower Records. I was also an intern at the 'Los Angeles Reader' in the Miracle Mile and at 'High Performance' magazine downtown.

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.

We're throwing everything in ... I think Showtime's mandate is to make some noise. And this is a pretty noisy show.

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

We dont vilify. We present them as is, and Im really proud to have remained neutral.

'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!

Personally, I like to yearn a little and long for the next episode. On the other hand, I'm also a glutton. My kids love to dive in and eat whole series at once.

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.

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.

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

I'm never going to look like a Nordic model, so I play with what I've got. Instead of going gray, I dye my hair bright colors; I have bad vision, so I wear sparkly glasses. I embrace that I look like a crazy lady.

I'm not a public figure; I shouldn't have to be held to a certain standard of beauty.

I'm from the creative side of Hollywood. I'm up for anyone that wants to support my work. If you have eyeballs and give me a budget and are nice to me, I'm in.

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

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.'

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

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.

As long as there are still interesting stories and still interesting people that we want to meet, I can keep it going. But, we all have to be invested. If the room starts getting bored or I start getting restless, then we'll either have to change something in the show or maybe end it.

But if I had my way, there would be so much more, in everything. It's so vital and integral in life, and it should be reflected in what we're watching, if we're reflecting our experiences. And it's hot. I love the sex stuff, and I want more.

You spend so much of your life crafting this stuff that you want to laugh in the room. I don't want to sit there and slit my wrists. And I think it reflects reality. People use humor to survive, even in the most horrific situations.

But, I like the challenge of, "How can we stretch this out? Where can we go with it?" It's an open road, especially at Netflix. You can take it anywhere you want.

We did tons of research. We went to visit a prison. We had speakers. We have read tons of supplementary material, books and articles. We are constantly emailing articles around the writers' room. We have dipped ourselves in prison culture and lore and media, and the experience and the people. We really want to be as informed as possible.

Piper reads the scripts, and we email a lot. Most of her comments are on the more technical side, like "This wouldn't happen. This is against the rules." She's been extremely respectful of our taking her story, and then veering left with it and taking it in its own direction. But, I always want her involved because she's the mother of all this.

If you go to a network and say, "I wanna do prison stories about black women and Latino women and old women," you're not gonna make a sale. But, if you've got this blonde girl going to prison, you can get in there, and then you can tell all the stories. I just thought it was a terrific gateway drug into all the things I wanted to get into.

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.

We're also talking a lot in the room about planting seeds that can grow over the course of the season, knowing that people might be watching them in bulk. We'd like to bury some Easter eggs and let people find them, later on.

I think a good story, well told is a good story, well told, whether you're watching the episodes all in a row or not. However, it might be fun to take a closer look at how the previous episode ends and how that end relates to the beginning of the next episode.

But, how many times can you get exactly what you want, when you want it? Not very often. So, why not have it with entertainment? That's what it's fun. It's fun! I find that's how I'm watching, more and more. My kids go on binges, and I get sucked in. And then, it's the middle of the night and they're late for school, the next day.

On the other hand, we worked a year on this and some people are going to watch it in a night and go, "We want more!" And there is something I miss about the longing and the anticipation for the next episode.

The oppression of it, the sense of helplessness, and really being part of a system and a bureaucracy that is arbitrary. I never thought of the depth of losing your freedom and what that meant. And I was surprised and delighted by ways people maintain their humanity and try to survive.

Even during the casting process, the pools of talent are so deep when you have a call for Latin women or black women or a middle-aged woman because they never get their shot. There's so much talent there.

To be able to be there first, I love the pioneer thing. It's exciting to me. And they pay full rate, they're really nice, they support the work, and they said yes. What could be bad? It's the Wild West. You can do what you want.

I begged her to write a song and she said yes. I am a huge Regina Spektor fan. I think she's a genius and just a lovely soul, and I wanted her voice on it. And she agreed, which is just the coolest thing, ever. She knocked it out of the park.

I think it would be exhausting and depressing, to write, to watch and to live, if it was just focused on drama. It's heavy. Also, I think the humor really highlights the pathos and the struggle. You can slam it up against drama, and it makes both shine.

Also, this is our lives for a huge part of the year and we did not want to be in prison, 24/7. It was too oppressive. So, we were like, "How can we get out? Let's see their lives, a little bit." That was really fun.

We fell in love with different people. Looking back, we might have done it in a different order, but we got invested. We really wanted to do the flashbacks because we wanted to explore who these women were on the outside versus the inside, and get a fuller picture of the masks we wear.

I'm always looking for a nexus, where you can put all these diverse people together, see how they respond to one another, see what they learn about each other, and what they like and don't like.

We watched these auditions and could only pick one. Sometimes we would add new characters 'cause we wanted to use another actress. There were so many people who were just waiting for something like this.

I think my immediate reaction was, "I'm so tired. I need a little more time." But, it was very quickly followed up by excitement. It's very flattering, and it's a wonderful vote of confidence. We dream of getting to do what we do.

It was enormously challenging because you want that all-American girl, but you also want the cool WASP, privileged white girl. Usually, women in that package aren't funny.

First of all, I find everything funny, which is upsetting to my children sometimes, and to people in my life, in general.

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.

You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up.

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

I'm always looking for those places where you can slam really disparate people up against one another, and they have to deal with each other. There are very few crossroads anymore. We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it's a mosaic. There's all these pieces, they're next to each other, they're not necessarily mixing. And I'm looking for those spaces where people actually do mix.

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 can shoot off my big mouth and write my shows and run my shows, and I can recognize how lucky I am because my position is rare and my position is privileged.