I'm drawn again and again to relationships between people who really, really want to connect and just can't get out of their own way to do it.

It's just not enough time on set. That's my favorite time. I live for that time on set. I feel like that's when I'm stretching and flexing my muscles and learning how to direct better.

Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.

Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.

All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.

It feels to me like everyone is going to do their best work when they feel emotionally safe.

I had a background in theater as an actor, and then a photographer, and then as an experimental filmmaker and editor.

I feel like this is the way I was meant to interact with acting. Which is as a director, and helping, working with actors to find their way. Facilitating their performances is so satisfying for me.

There's so much great TV and I always thought it would be such a fun little sideway to make money and then not have to worry about my films making a lot of money.

I can connect with whoever I want to connect with in the world. And I can also write my own script. I don't have to follow rules. I can sort of just be unconventional.

I hope to keep working with television. I wouldn't mind doing more.

Live to learn to love. Learn to love to live. Love to live to learn so that you may live the life that you yearn.

Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build my castle.

Everybody thought I was a bit of an eccentric for wanting to be out there looking at the stars, but I still do

I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards.

Libertarians should say, 'I love this country too much to take away votes from the Republican'

The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, are black ones.

The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

For God's sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.

A little matter will move a party, but it must be something great that moves a nation.

Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.