I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.

ANDREW: But do you think there’s a line? You know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?FLETCHER: No. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.

The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic.

It's interesting when you wind up distilling all your ambitions and your goals and dreams into one single person. It's giving that person a lot of power.

I've always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.

I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.

I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.

'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Darkness is a kind of visual silence, and monks love it.

What she really craved was a connection. That feeling you got when you knew you were supposed to be with someone.

Adult dragons are,astute,powerful,and sure of their strength.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

I can't see heaven but I credit hell I live in New York so I know it well. When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome God gave it up and He went home.

Children do run from me. And so do some adults.

Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

We all want to be happy.