I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.

Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.

A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.

We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.

Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.

It's kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.

Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.

I always viewed life as material for a movie.

I found him between a reality and a nightmare.

Silence leads us back to our purpose, and it ignites creativity and vision.

I am totally convinced the Christian faith is the most coherent worldview around.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Do you realize how good you have to be to strike out 2000 times?

You feel that no matter what's said in the music or how pointed it may get, the most you can wish for is that it plants a few seeds.

I like complicated characters.

Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation: youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.

We walk around every day not knowing the exact level of risk and benefit associated with most of our actions, yet it remains our responsibility to decide what’s worth pursuing.

My mind shrank from the menace sweeping down on us, as children's do from belief in death and misfortune, vainly clinging to the fancy that great disasters only happen to other people.