Producer

Our worst instincts as human beings have to do with our carelessness with natural resources, and when the body itself becomes just one more of those resources, how will we treat it? Will we treat it with such indifference and with such depersonalization that it becomes more like a very fancy car than a repository of the self?

Like a lot of people, I sold my first script in graduate school at UCLA, a 'Joan of Arc' for producer Joel Silver.

On one hand, my gender has never been an issue. The issue has always been what's on the page. But the reality is, an awful lot of women fought an awful lot of battles to get me to that place.

Honestly, I would never say, 'Oh, I've decided not to read 'The Left Hand of Darkness' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.' I've decided not to read 'Neuromancer' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.''

I'm a geek! I'm a fan girl; I'm very proud of that. Get me near Orlando Jones, it will not be pretty.

The essential nature of all filmed entertainment is that you area always straddling the line of whether or not you can realize something that you want to do.

The emotional passage of time is always a good thing.

Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were the biggest inspirations for my work because they trod into areas considered to be owned by male writers and created these worlds that are infused with an understanding of so much more than just technology.

All the science fiction I loved as a kid was holding up a mirror to society and warning us about the need for course correction.

Don't worry about what happens when things go wrong; just accept that they're going to, and figure out how do you want to cope with it when it does.

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

I just never count on anything. You can't.

Of course I worry about whitewashing, and I feel very strongly that whitewashing was, is, and continues to be a problem in entertainment.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is not a book or show advocating enslaving women or creating a theocracy. It's not glorifying that. It's talking about what happens if that happens.

There was a brief period in college where I flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer because my father was one. But I was cured of it rather swiftly.