There is nothing more depressing than toast that no one eats.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

I feel like there's a certain kind of laughter missing in the world.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

I want to write stories that don't help you escape life, but embrace life.

People love conversation, and movies are conversations, and an audience has to participate; it has to fill in some blanks.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

I want to make accessible movies for bright people, but I don't want to play games and be coy.

The bigger the budget, the less an audience is trusted, and that's the difference between a big-budget film and a small-budget film.

My job as a dramatist is to find out where these characters want to go, and make it as hard as possible for them to get there.

Everything you want in life is a relationship away.

I laugh, and it sounds like I've been sucking helium.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

I've got to be honest and say that, growing up, I wasn't a big sports guy, but I love the camaraderie. I just love people getting together, fighting for a team and getting super-emotional about it.

Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead.

The discovery that it is in our power to change our lives by the thoughts we think is the first step toward spiritual mastery.

You can only talk rubbish if you're aware of knowledge.

I think as a mature artist, you're probably always trying to undo the compromises of one's self [in general]. It's not necessarily to do with youth.

Religion is an act of sedition against reason. Whatever religion is most seductive and likely to draw in victims to surrender their skepticism is the worst.