A lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful,engaged people? Are busy doing. I wanted to be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. That was my dream. I blue-skied it like crazy. I dreamed and dreamed. And while I was dreaming I was living in my sister's basement. Dreamers often end up living in the basement of relatives.

[on her role as a working mother] If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other. That is the trade-off. That is the Faustian bargain with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel one hundred percent okay. You never get your sea-legs. You are always a little nauseous.

Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter. I love them. I will hashtag my way into next week. But a hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Mr. King. It does not change anything. It's you,sitting on your butt, typing into your computer and then going back to binge-watching your favorite show.

It's superinsulting that because Olivia [in Scandal (2012)] is a woman, and the girl who wrote Grey's Anatomy (2005) wrote this, it must be for chicks. Like if it's geared for women, it's somehow not as serious as if it's geared for men.

[re her highly diverse, minority casting] I think it's sad, and weird, and strange that it's still a thing. It's 2013. Somebody else needs to get their act together. And, oh, by the way, it works. Ratings-wise, it works. When people who aren't of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as 'I'm a black man blah, blah, blah'. That's not how the world works. I'm a black woman every day, and I'm not confused about that. I'm not worried about that. I don't need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don't feel disempowered as a black woman.

I was writing a hospital show for a very long time, and that became all that anybody thought that I could write. It's not that I want to do [for example, a female-spy show] because people don't think of me as doing it, but when I do say that's what I want to do next, and some network exec says: 'Really? Can't you do one of your romance triangle-y things?' I want to strangle them. A romance triangle-y thing is not a show.

[re troubles with Grey's Anatomy (2005) cast where she had to learn...] how to be a boss and a leader versus somebody who was like, 'Holy crap, I get to write a show every week.' But could I have lived without that lesson? Absolutely.

I don't understand why people don't understand that the world of TV should look like the world outside of TV.