I think everyone who makes movies should be forced to do television. Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are a lot of decisions made just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the story told and it connects to the audience.

You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world. You always have been.

Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don’t push me, and I won’t push you. Dong le ma?

That girl will rain destruction down on you and your ship. She is an albatross, Captain. Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it. [to Inara] Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.

I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.

It's about women. It's about power and it's about women and you just hate those two words in the same sentence, don't you?