Shonda Rhimes Quotes

For me, beauty is me at the top of my game, going as hard as I can, without fear of what anyone else thinks. Believing in yourself when nobody else is believing in you is half the battle about anything.

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.

My worst trait is that I’m an introvert. When I’ve led stuff, the hardest thing for me to overcome has been my natural desire to run and hide. I’m very proud of the fact that I have been able to do that.

I actually like being alone. I spend most evenings reading and taking long baths.

When you help make people healthier, it makes the nation healthier; it makes the world healthier. It makes the economy healthier.

Sometimes people don’t want to be empowered because they are afraid of being the person to make the decisions.

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 have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there’s such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can’t imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don’t believe there is room for all of it. I really don’t.

I learned how to write TV by writing ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’

I say it in the writers’ room all the time: My black is not your black. What’s terrifying is that, just the same way we’ve all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there’s only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That’s as damaging as anything else.

A lot of people think that they are leaders just because they have been placed in charge of something – and you’re not.

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.

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.

We have people say, ‘There’s not enough women writers.’ I have a writers room that is almost nothing but women over at ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’

That first year I was doing ‘Grey’s,’ I didn’t know it was possible to fire the creator of a show off their own show, so I didn’t behave like somebody who was afraid of being fired.

I don’t get to watch a lot of TV, mainly because I’m busy working. And I pretty much try not to watch very much television at all, even American television, until I’m done with a season, because things start to creep into my head otherwise.

I like people with their own opinions, and I like people who argue with me. It’s very exhausting to be in a room full of people who just nod and smile.

When the script is finished, and you’re sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you’ve written, and you’re hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.

Having a strong sense of self is fundamental to you, no matter what you’re doing. I don’t care if you’re a stay at home mom raising kids or if you’re the CEO of a corporation. It’s really important for your survival.

I’ve never personally had to use a Planned Parenthood. But I have many friends who have and do and did, and I think it’s important that that access be there for everyone.

I binge pretty much everything. If I’m watching something, I’m bingeing it. I binged ‘The Good Place’ recently. ‘Handmaid’s Tale.’

I love having boyfriends. I love dating. I do not want a husband in my house.

I don’t think that my job requires me to be competitive at all. I’m in my office by myself, or I’m in my writers’ room with my people. I’ve chosen a job in which there’s no competition allowed. It’s probably best for everyone.

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.

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.

I have found that if I spend the first hour of my day at home, I get more done, and less people steal my time.

My father used to say to me, ‘The only limit to your success is your own imagination.’ I actually believed that – like, I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I might not be an Olympic figure skater.

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.

My poor children have been the subject of all of my experiments. We’re still doing what I call ‘Amish summers’ where I turn off all electronics and pack away all their computers and stuff and watch them scream for a while until they settle down into, like, an electronic-free summer.

Disney has made $2 billion on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ I don’t have $2 billion.

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 spent a lot of times sitting in big rooms full of a lot of men and executives thinking, ‘What would Oprah say right now?’ and trying to channel that as hard as I could. And mostly that was just about having the confidence. If this woman did it, it can be done. And there’s no reason for anybody to stop you.

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.

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’m not a person who’s interested in getting involved with politics just to get involved with them, and I don’t need to.

What’s great about Netflix is that everything is kind of instantaneous, and it goes around the world instantly. Everything is released at once. The format can be a little bit whatever you want.

I like working more than I like being at home. Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home?

After I lost weight, I discovered that people found me valuable. Worthy of conversation. A person one could look at. A person one could compliment. A person one could admire. A person.

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.

There is a part of me that’s oblivious. People always ask me, ‘What obstacles have you faced?’ and I always think, ‘What are you talking about?’ Whether or not there were obstacles, I never saw obstacles. It’s never occurred to me that I wasn’t good enough for something.

I really do feel like the work and time we spend avoiding having difficult conversations is so much more wasteful and painful and time-consuming than actually having the difficult conversation.

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.

Shondaland is my company. I run that mother. I am in charge. I am the leader. It’s fantastic. It’s also really hard. As it should be.

I want to be able to sing like Whitney Houston did.

Most people, I think, have accepted that it’s not up to them to control other people’s choices, except, it seems, when it comes to Washington, D.C., where everyone has an opinion about people’s uteruses.

‘Grey’s’ has this universal, global thing to it. It works all over the world.

There’s nothing wrong with being driven. And there’s nothing wrong with putting yourself first to reach your goals.

My philosophy was always try to look like Whitney Houston at all times. That did not work out so well.

The idea that the more you hide something, the more it becomes something that’s supposed to feel shameful is very true.

I think that women are raised to believe that they’re supposed to want certain things, and so you feel like you’re supposed to apologize when you don’t want those things.

Getting on a plane and discovering that your seat belt won’t fit around you was a moment of extreme horror. It was very hard to ignore.

I can’t change the past. It made me what I am.

It’s important to have people who are absolutely willing to say you’re wrong or who have a totally different perspective than you do on everything. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, and good ones are even harder.

What I found fascinating for me was, I’ve never gotten so much approval and accolades and warmth and congratulations as when I had a guy on my arm that people thought I was going to marry. It was amazing. I mean, nobody congratulated me that hard when I had my three children.

Italy during Shakespeare’s time had citizens of all cultures and colors. To pretend that it did not is ignorance. And I don’t waste my time on ignorance.

I don’t know why people don’t feel like being positive is much more powerful than being negative.

My favorite thing to do is rip the covers off a script when reading for writers to hire and make everybody read without names on the covers of the script. I can’t tell you how many times my writers, women and men, will pick people of color and women much more often than they would with a cover on the script.

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 actually really love Twitter – I used to feel angry and insulted when people criticised me or the shows, but now I don’t take it too seriously. What I do love is that there’s this great direct line to fans.

I don’t know that I think women have to throw out the fairy tale ending. I just think they have to decide what their fairy tale ending is – and not go with the standard one that everyone’s told them they’re supposed to have.