Winnie Holzman

I'm certainly a real homebody. But the truth is that I understand that desire to, in a way, go join the circus. That's what got me out of Long Island and into show business. I was like, 'I'm just going to have an adventure. I want to be a person that isn't surrounded by their mail and their cat.'

The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn't really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.

For me, being a writer, you want to communicate with people, but if your goal is that every person is going to love what you do, then you're always going to be disappointed.

I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.

As a writer who has collaborated on projects, you give your life over to that project.

In my life, it's always been about who I'm going to collaborate with. Less important to me is what the subject is.

The whole idea of a dream, to me, is a mystery plane. Things are operating there that tell us the real truth. The stuff going on inside us that we don't express or even know about pours out in our dreams.

The Huntington Theatre has a really fine reputation. I was keenly aware of how well thought of they are and that they develop and support new plays.

When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.

I loved the whole idea, first of all, of what friendship is. Very often, there are people that somehow you don't know how to declare that you are their friend, but you are their friend. That happens in a lot in high school. And outside of high school.

Camp is like this set-apart world where people go to try to change who they are, and yet change is really scary.

I really learned that, when I got into television, I really learned the power, how deeply it affects people to see themselves on television, to see something that they can relate to, that they feel is like them in some way; people feel validated. Its not a little thing. It really means a lot to people. It actually can change people.