Top 35 Mike White Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My whole life I’ve been a seeker, searching for something.”

— Mike White

2. “A flower doesn’t love you or hate you, it just exists.”

— Mike White

3. “There’s a victory in letting go of your expectations.”

— Mike White

4. “I can be really annoying, but I also feel like I’m a nice person.”

— Mike White

5. “I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.”

— Mike White

6. “To me, this is from a Buddhist perspective or whatever, sometimes people who are working out their political beliefs, they can rage against the man, and yet at the same time can be oblivious to their own way of stepping on the foot of the person right next to them.”

— Mike White

7. “I used to have a road-rage issue.”

— Mike White

8. “People who write books – they live in their own world as they’re writing. But people who are doing shows or big movies – not only are you writing this world that you’re living in, but you’re also simultaneously running a circus, and you can kind of start losing your mind like that.”

— Mike White

9. “My impulse is to create an aesthetic that’s about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.”

— Mike White

10. “I have had moments where I’ve had mental-health issues and I’ve felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.”

— Mike White

11. “I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain – that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.”

— Mike White

12. “I feel like so much of my life is about a conversation I’m having with myself. I do interact with other people, but often I’m more interested in what I’m learning in the relationship I have with myself.”

— Mike White

13. “You want to work with people who you like and have an easy rapport with.”

— Mike White

14. “As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.”

— Mike White

15. “As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture.”

— Mike White

16. “To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.”

— Mike White

17. “There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.”

— Mike White

18. “I think living in our culture right now, there’s a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that’s rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.”

— Mike White

19. “I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there’s funny stuff in it but I’ve lost the emotional connection to the characters because it’s just so bananas.”

— Mike White

20. “I grew up in a religious family, and we weren’t allowed to listen to rock music.”

— Mike White

21. “You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you’re a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.”

— Mike White

22. “From my experience, meditating can bring up the most stressful thoughts.”

— Mike White

23. “I believe, in general, that even people that are self-pitying, you can feel for them.”

— Mike White

24. “I’m not really a director or producer for hire. There’s lots of big gigs out there, but I’m not looking to do that. Usually, when I’m directing or producing, I’ve written it myself. I’m not really trying to get on some big horse that’s running through town. I just make my own stuff.”

— Mike White

25. “Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out – and this happens to me a lot, actually – the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.”

— Mike White

26. “I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.”

— Mike White

27. “As an actor, it’s better to just be more loose and give yourself over. That’s always fun. It’s fun to just let go and be somebody else.”

— Mike White

28. “I don’t even give my scripts to friends because I just feel it’s, like, I don’t need one more set of opinions.”

— Mike White

29. “I don’t feel the breath of a thousand people over my shoulder.”

— Mike White

30. “I actually think it’s helped me as a writer to have to act. It’s only when you actually start putting yourself out that you appreciate the anxiety that comes with having to try to sell a line, or with trying to own a character.”

— Mike White

31. “I guess I’m trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.”

— Mike White

32. “People don’t go to see things in the theater for the same reasons that I do. And movies are about mass audiences. And so moviegoers are going for a different kind of drug than for a certain kind of literary quality.”

— Mike White

33. “For me, writing is a solitary thing and a personal thing. And it’s weird, because when you make something that requires money and collaborators, you have to talk about them. I don’t enjoy that part of it. I still want to keep it to myself.”

— Mike White

34. “I feel like I know how to write plot.”

— Mike White

35. “I do idiosyncratic dramedies.”

— Mike White