Joss Whedon Quotes

“If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better,” he said. “To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It’s not just parroting your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“Joss’s stories are often centered on moments just like this. He shares a conversation that he had with Stephen Sondheim, in which they were discussing the stories each of them tells. Joss said he was always going to write about adolescent girls with superpowers. Sondheim replied, “And I will always write about yearning.” “Goddammit, his answer was so much cooler than mine!” Joss says— but Sondheim’s answer pushed him to break down his own tales and figure out what his driving impetus was, what he was really writing about. “Helplessness was what I realized was sort of the basic thing,” Joss explains. “All of these empowerment stories come from my fear and hatred of the idea of somebody who is really helpless, who is a non-being.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“The notion that every choice you make means that other possibilities are eliminated forever -- as a kid, I found that terrifying,' Joss recalled. 'As an adult, I still find it scary.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“My generation, we were kind of raised on the super-cool, “I can handle anything” with a gun in his hand hero. Any situation you throw at him, he can handle it—with catchphrases. It was very cool. But Joss Whedon’s version of a hero doesn’t always win. He loses more than he wins, and when he wins, the victories are tiny, but he takes ’em. “That’s a victory! I call that a victory!” It’s a tiny victory—he takes it, and that’s what he walks away with. And that’s something I can actually relate to.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“And Joss, Gregg, Renner, and Hiddleston confirmed that there was “some Avengers affinity” for the video game Dance Dance Revolution. But”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“In 2014, an American television show interviewed Russians about their country’s oppressive laws against the LGBT community. To explain what had inspired her decision to protest these laws, one woman quoted a line from Angel: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“According to Joss [Whedon], “TV is a question, movies are an answer.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family -- and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do -- I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time,' Joss said. 'I wasn't living a life that was particularly different from anybody else's ... It wasn't like I didn't have friends, but .. we, all of us, are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life. Loneliness and aloneness -- which are different things -- are very much, I would say, [among the] main things I focus on in my work.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“Joss was lonely kid who thought that if he could just crack the code, people would understand what an awesome person he was and love him for it. As Buffy executive producer and Angel cocreator David Greenwalt said, 'If JossWhedon had had one good day in high school, we wouldn't be here'.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“That exploration of faith would become an important aspect of the series, embodied in the relationship between the pious Shepherd Book and the lapsed believer Mal Reynolds. Captain Reynolds “is a man who has learned that when he believed in something it destroyed him,” Joss said. “So what he believes in is the next job, the next paycheck and keeping his crew safe.” The series pushes past the idea that a belief in God is necessary for a moral life, and questions the definition of morality that others want to impose. Mal, to Joss, is a “guy who looks into the void and sees nothing but the void—and says there is no moral structure, there is no help, no one’s coming, no one gets it, I have to do it.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“With three of its fourteen episodes still unaired and two of them still in production, Firefly was canceled.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better,”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“Joss would come to understand that this position— respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze— helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. “You can't write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that’s a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don’t want to talk about.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: “It’s us against the world, and dammit, we’ve got good work to do here, let’s all get it done.” Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn’t expecting. “It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things— connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said. “Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, even if I’m firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we’re all involved, that we’re all on the same level.”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography

“But what clicked with Joss most of all was that Greenwalt was able to balance his edginess with an old-school approach to narrative. It was Greenwalt, Joss says, who was “constantly pulling us back to ‘But do we care about Buffy? But is Buffy in trouble?’” “We learned early on when we started writing that we’ve got to have the metaphor,” Greenwalt explains. After all, a storyline that’s just about a cool monster every week would quickly get old and predictable. “You’ve got to have the Buffy of it— what does it mean?”
― Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography