Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

I believe in what science fiction can do, which is it can set up simple rules that it has to follow to try to illuminate something about the present that is somewhat invisible to us.

One of my favorite stories growing up was 'A Wrinkle in Time'. I loved that book.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

Human beings are flawed and complicated and messy.

I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.

Writing so that I can act became a way of having not more control over my future but not having to wait for permission. You can choose yourself. Hmm, who should play this part? I nominate me!

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

People go to the cinema to be moved; they wanna laugh, they wanna cry, they wanna feel something deeply, especially if they're not feeling deeply in their own lives.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.

It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

I've never thought intelligence was age-related.

An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words