Be open to other people's ideas. Don't get arrogant about your ideas. Shoot a lot of options so you're not stuck with just one version of something.

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do.

Germany's amongst my top three places in the world I'd like to live.

I want to meet the man who saw a turtle and said, "People will LOVE the ninja version of that."

I assume everything I do in life is gonna be a failure, and then if it turns up roses, then I'm psyched.

If you're trying to make someone happy, you gotta try and make them happy.

New Orleans is like the bad-kid island in 'Pinocchio.'

The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity.

I don't like to say mean things about people's hard work.

I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest - things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know.

I mean, being shot in slow motion doing cocaine by Martin Scorsese is, like, maybe every actor's dream. Nothing will compare to it. Except maybe having kids.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Life has never been easy. Nor is it meant to be. It is a matter of being joyous in the face of sorrow.

Food is a subject of conversation more spiritually refreshing even than the weather, for the number of possible remarks about the weather is limited, whereas of food you can talk on and on and on.

Admiration from my readers inspire me, and the only 'formula' I believe in towards making a good writer is: 'to thine own self be true!'

There is a God-shaped hole in the life of every man.

It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

I say to people today, 'You must be prepared if you believe in something. If you believe in something, you have to go for it. As individuals, we may not live to see the end.

Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.