People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.

I always was an early-morning or late-night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning, you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

A lot of people who saw 'The Avengers' didn't read comic books, don't like comic book movies, and enjoyed it. That was huge for me.

TV's like whitewater rafting: Without rocks, there wouldn't be rapids, and it wouldn't be as much fun.

The Internet community started forming right when 'Buffy' started airing, and the notion of a show creator being anything other than a name people recognize on the screen was completely new.

The problem for me is that 'Watchmen,' one of the great comics of all time, is a look at superheroes that has gone beyond the concept of or necessity for superheroes.

I'm not big on regret; I don't spend a lot of time on it.

My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.

I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

I tend to tell stories that have a lot of momentum; it's not like 'and then months later...' I like things where the momentum of one action rolls into the next one so everything is the sum of that.

Running a TV show is always running a TV show; it's never not running a TV show.

What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.

I would love to give you a more in-depth coherent explanation of my view of the soul, and if I had one I would. The soul and my concept of it are as ephemeral as anybody's, and possibly more so.

On one level, I must never lose touch with my audience. But I must, at some point, stop trying to get everybody to like me, and be true to the thing I think I need to say.

I had older brothers, and I don't think there's anything worse than an older brother. They pretty much told me the end of everything they got to see before I did.

What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.

I loved working with 'The Avengers' cast and we had a great time, but it was a job, and they had other commitments during that job, so they would go off and do other things.

Buffy loves Angel. He loves her. And I love Ho Hos.

Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.

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

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

If somebody comes up to me, it's because they're moved by something I'm moved by. I've never taken a job I didn't love... So when somebody's coming up to me, or they're writing, they're in the same space I am in.

Oddly enough, I never studied writing. I studied almost everything except writing.

That title, is one of the things I fought for. A lot of people said 'But it's stupid, and it's the title of a comedy movie, and people won't take it seriously,' and I'm sure there are some people who still don't. But for the most part, people do see that we really have a quality show.

You know, the thing that I do to waste time is think of things I want to make. That's how my mind is employed.

When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life.

I love TV in a way that I don't love any other medium.

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.

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

The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it.

Kristen Stewart is kind of captivating; she can just stare at stuff and it works because I still want to watch it.

I am a great believer in found families and I'm not a great believer in blood.

I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up.

TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

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.

I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.

When I created Buffy, I wanted to create a female icon, but I also wanted to be very careful to surround her with men that not only have no problem with the idea of a female leader, but were in fact engaged and even attracted to the idea.

There are two things that interest me - and they're both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.

Everybody who labels themselves a 'nerd' isn't some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who's never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

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.

There's not going to be a 'Buffy' season nine on television.

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.

I don't know a lot of show runners. I mean I met a lot of them in picket lines. I'm not part of a, like, secret society or pickup basketball game. As far as I'm concerned, pick-up basketball games are secret societies. They confuse me. I've never been a networker or I've never been very social.

I think 'Batman Begins' is certainly my favorite Batman movie I've seen.

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.

Every time you work on a project, it's a little vacation from the project you're working on the other 23 hours. That's the thing - it replenishes you to do something else.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of 'women are inferior.'

I always watch what I say. I am what I say.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.