I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.

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.

Don’t criticize them

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Money and women. They're two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn't do for anything else. Same with money.

I think encouraging young people to twerk might be a bad thing. It's a stripper's move. If I had a daughter of nine, I wouldn't want her twerking.

Where your attention goes, you go.

You can want success all you want, but to get it, you can’t falter. You can’t slip. You can’t sleep. One eye open, for real, and forever.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

Half of my success is my fearlessness and recklessness, of just seeing the end and not stopping until you get there.

I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.

But methings wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it