Top 50 Marti Noxon Quotes

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger‘ not only applies to the deeply personal subject matter of ‘To the Bone‘ but to simply getting a film about people with eating disorders made. Without the brilliant Julie Lynn, Bonnie Curtis, and Karina Miller producing, there’s no way this project would be coming to fruition.

When every word is parsed for ill intention, regardless of who is speaking or why, we become so afraid we’ll offend that we stop trying to communicate with people we don’t understand.

For me, the interesting thing about anorexia is that you show your wound. There’s no hiding it. So my anger and sense of disappointment, all the stuff I was out of touch with, became this visible rebuke to my parents.

I’m so excited to be part of the environment that David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross have built at Skydance.

I think there’s a good-er divorce. I think that’s absolutely possible. There’s a better way to do it and everything in between, and then, of course, there’s the disastrous way to do it.

Can’t write worrying what the Internet‘s going to think.

We did have ‘The Bronze‘, a very active website on ‘Buffy’ where we got a lot of feedback and post-game discussion. But now it’s important to be engaged in the discussion while the show is airing and right after.

The dream of doing what I do started with watching movies by Mr. Spielberg, like ‘Close Encounters,’ ‘Poltergeist,’ and ‘E.T.’ That was the beginning of my obsession.

The best feeling you can ever have when you’re working on a show is that the characters are still inside you, and they have a lot left to do.

I’m such a type A doer myself that if someone said I had a month off, I think I’d go crazy and try to organize the vacation resort!

You can’t ever create defensively. You just have to create the next thing that really speaks to you.

Not proud. But I watched ‘The Bachelor‘ only once, and I really felt, after that experience, that I could never do it again. I felt it was so morally compromising, as a woman.

I’ve watched my fair share of ‘Housewives.’ And I just felt a little dirty afterwards.

I bemoaned the pending loss of Obamacare/the Affordable Care Act.

I always joke that I’m a feminist with a boob job.

I had been anorexic for about five years. And I was really sick. I probably weighed about 70 pounds.

You really can’t quantify what ‘Dietland’ is.

That went on for a long time: telling various tales from my experience being anorexic and bulimic, and having people say, ‘You’ve got to write this; you are a writer,’ and me not knowing how to approach the material.

Women want to watch the dark stuff.

Sometimes when I’m reading a script, I can’t quite believe that this is going on television alongside cereal commercials.

There’s no shape or body type that makes you more happy or more lovable. It’s the body you’re comfortable in that makes you happier and more lovable. I look around and see how women and men of all types find the love and the life they want.

There’re been sort of a sea change in my work in general, in that the more personal, the universal it’s become.

Being the director – way fancier than ‘just’ being the writer. People call you ‘talent.’

‘Just’ writing is every bit as important as any other creative part of a film.

I’ve grown and changed, and I’m still making television and movies that I feel really proud of.

It’s funny: I’ve joked that ‘Sharp Objects,’ ‘To the Bone,’ and ‘Dietland’ are my self-harm trilogy, and each one is a different side of that triangle, with ‘Dietland’ really about fighting back.

Being an aging woman in Hollywood is no picnic.

The truth is there’s a difference between the competition shows where you’re testing skills and the type of shows where you’re trying to create drama.

When you’re allowed to tell stories with ambiguity and darkness and things that are still unresolved, that’s the dream scenario as opposed to having to fit into a more procedural mode or something a little more conventional. That’s not what’s working on TV right now.

Scenes on phones are really boring!

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get ‘teamthink’: you can all go down a crazy path together.

I don’t like characters who are either good or bad. I just don’t experience that in life, so my writing hasn’t evolved that way.

There’s this idea that Hollywood sells over and over again: ‘If I just looked more like this, I’d be accepted.’

That’s a big part of the process: making the right choice from the beginning. Not getting distracted by shiny things.

Like everbody, I’m addicted to ‘The Handmaid‘s Tale.’

When I was going to get ready to take ‘Dietland’ up, I have to say I was surprised to find that I felt like maybe we wouldn’t find a home for it because it’s unlike anything else that I’ve done.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

I’m a huge fan of Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark.’

Test audiences are notorious for getting kind of itchy when people talk too much, and you have to trust your instincts that they don’t necessarily understand that you’re not digesting the movie on a scene-by-scene basis.

The bane of every TV writer’s existence is the likability note.

It all starts with a very solid, well-executed script, where the story is very clear and everybody is rowing in the same direction. That’s always good; that’s a constant.

I think many people expend a tremendous amount of energy on self-loathing and self-flagellation as well as getting caught in a vicious cycle of dieting and gaining the weight back.

I’ll be honest: I had a real deep-seated fear that ‘Buffy’ was going to be my peak. It was such a beautiful experience. It was such a fully realized show.

In ‘UnREAL’, for me, just being so openly feminist, just being so overtly, like, ‘This show is about women who are not necessarily likable, doing a job that is despicable, and we are not going to be afraid of that.’

I can’t be interesting, controversial, and the writer I’d like to be if I need everybody to like me and think I’m doing the right thing, because those two things, in my experience, never go hand in hand.

On ‘Girlfriends‘ Guide to Divorce,’ we have a mandate to hire as many women as possible, but particularly on a show that is about women and about progressive issues like that.

I think I’ve also grown a little bit in that I’m not so easily dissuaded if I really believe something.

Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers‘ room is like saying the same word over and over and over again until it doesn’t make sense anymore. Like, you say it until you don’t know what you’re saying.

Any press is good press.

I certainly often go to a movie and don’t remember exactly what the trailer had in it, except that it looked cool.