Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

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.

Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and greatest weakness.

As we got older, their mischiefs continued to be shrugged off, but mine were not, and I knew from that point that I was measured from a different stick than my brothers.

I was born in '74, so I missed out on all the great early '60s and early '70s.

Use it, Rosie, that's what it's there for.

Cell phones are like a dog's nipples... you don't have to shout into them!

Don't try to be a hero. Try to be a winner.

If you can't say yes, it's no. Don't sugarcoat it. Don't talk yourself into yes just to seem like a nice guy. No one ever went broke because he or she said "NO" too often.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

Do not waste your time with people who have shown you they really mean no good for you.

Mindfulness can play a big role in transforming our experience with pain & other difficulties; it allows us to recognize the authenticity of the distress & yet not be overwhelmed by it.