Joss Whedon Quotes

You do not want a war. You have known violence, you have suffered loss, but you have seen nothing of war. War is not just the business of death; it is the anti-thesis of life. Hope, tortured and flayed, reason, dismembered, grinning at its limbs in its lap. Decency, raped to death... You will be a murderer and more.

I don't have a particular ambition in any medium. I just want to keep telling stories. If somebody pays me, also good.

Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that’s overwhelmingly depressing to me, and sometimes it makes me feel kinship and forgiveness. We’ve all got the same ending to the story. The way we make that story more elaborate, I got to respect.

My mother really was an extraordinary, inspirational, tough, cool, sexy, funny woman and that's the kind of woman I've always surrounded myself with. It's my friends, particularly my wife, who is not only smarter than and stronger than I am but, occasionally taller too. I think it all goes back to my mother. My father and my stepfather prized whit and resolve in the women they were with above all things. And they were among the rare men who understood that recognising somebody else's power does not diminish your own.

Basically that you can do anything. If you pool your resources,and just give up the idea that you're going to act like a normal person or sleep, if you want it hard enough and do it well enough, it happens. A lot of really talented people either sort of get crushed under the wheel of the movie studio system or desperately try and get their next gig in TV. I understand why, because we've all got to put food on the table and the brass ring is out there, we'd all like to be making the Emmy-winning shows and the blockbusters and all that, but at the same time you could be doing stuff yourself.

"Angel, when I look into the future, all I see is you! All I want is you." "I know the feeling."

Shiny, let's be bad guys!

The goal is always about the next story. It's always about the thing I haven't done before. It's about learning, or it's about becoming better, and it's about whatever story grabs hold of me.

Everything I do is going to contain the message that men who are going to be comfortable with powerful women are going to be more powerful men

The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don't have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead.

Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.

I've seen [Donald Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he's a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. But other people fell in love with him as a reality star. So does that mean that the entertainment industry is doing something wrong? I think reality TV answered that question a long time ago: Yes, it's doing something terribly wrong. But there's some great reality TV, and I'm not bagging on it completely.

I am a huge fan of what Marvel has established. But when they first came to me, Thor and Captain America were not even close to being finished. I thought to myself, 'Okay, you have all these moving parts, but how can you possibly bring them together?' Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America don't seem like they could co-exist, and ultimately that is what intrigued me and made me think, 'This can be done and this should be done.' You can't put these characters in a movie together without a certain amount of humor. It's an inoculation against the unreality.

I've got a theory, it could be bunnies... I've got a theor- Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes They've got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses. And what's with all the carrots-? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunnies, bunnies it must be bunnies! ...or maybe midgets.

I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.

Everything has been for the [President] election for the last couple of months. Since the Democratic National Convention, it's been a dead run to get out as much content as possible and do as much as possible. Then, I go back to writing the screenplay I was working on, which is an original piece - a period piece that I will hopefully finish a couple of months after that, and hopefully I can convince some unsuspecting fool studio to buy.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

The two things that matter the most to me: emotional resonance and rocket launchers. Party of Five, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers.

There is always backlash. Everything gets backlash.

As far as I am concerned, the first episode of Buffy was the beginning of my career. It was the first time I told a story from start to finish the way I wanted.

Nowadays I'm really cranky about comics. Because most of them are just really, really poorly written soft-core. And I miss good old storytelling. And you know what else I miss? Super powers. Why is it now that everybody's like "I can reverse the polarity of your ions!" Like in one big flash everybody's Doctor Strange. I like the guys that can stick to walls and change into sand and stuff. I don't understand anything anymore. And all the girls are wearing nothing, and they all look like they have implants. Well, I sound like a very old man, and a cranky one, but it's true.

I've become less cynical, which is appalling but kind of cool.

I have a desperate longing to have a desperate longing

The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it.

We have things to say about Congress and all of that. I think we may have our magnum opus coming yet. It's a piece called "Leonard" that I'm very excited about, and I think we're going to see a side of Chris Pine that people haven't really seen yet. That's all I'm going to say, but I'm proud of it.

I could not conceive that [fans] actually wanted me to sign something. It took a long time for me to figure out (a) just say 'Thank you' and sign the thing, and (b) smile in the picture, because if you try to just half-smile you're going to look constipated.

When I read [the script] and saw that it was my fanboy wet dream of an Avengers script and that [Agent] Coulson was a big part of it, that was the great day for me. I just drove around the streets with the script in the other seat, giggling.

Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns.

Xander, don't speak Latin in front of the books.

Everything is so fragile. There's so much conflict, so much pain... You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along - that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy - I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get, 'cause it's here, and then... gone.

I don't want the giant ego. I don't want to become Kevin Costner, singing on the soundtrack to The Postman.

Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.

'The Sixth Sense' is fine the second time around, but honestly, the first time around, it's dazzling.

Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.

If I kill you, you'll be awake, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed.

Absolutely eat dessert first. The thing that you want to do the most, do that.

Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction. We live in a space ship, dear.

I don't think I'm like Shakespeare.

Now there’s us, staking out our piece of cinematic turf (might be small but it’s ours). And the music has to fit the vision as specifically as it did for [Star Wars and The Matrix.] OUR music comes from THEIR music, this scrappled bunch. It is spare, intimate, mournful and indefatigable.

In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical.

I hate it when people talk about Buffy as being campy... I hate camp, I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.

Horror movies don't exist unless you go and see them, and people always will.

I don't think I'm a celebrity. Maybe I'm a cult figure?

There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible their reactions to it are very normal.

A writer is supposed to have anonymity.

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.

A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend

The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion. Because in the world of magics, it's the hardest thing to do.