When I go to the movies, I do like to see things that surprise me, a little bit, in ways that seem truthful to the world that we live in.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.

Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

The adjacent shores resounded with the alternate shouts of the sons of liberty and the groans of their parting spirits.

Test everything that can be tested. As soon as you think you know something, that's when you stop questioning it. Understanding kills curiosity. Understanding kills progress.

Two days after my dad's funeral, my mom went on a mission. I never understood it until then--that sometimes a spy doesn't need a cover so much as she needs a shield.

You are your own best friend. Listen to yourself more often than someone else.

Pray to God.

Somehow, we each create our own prison, for which only we, hold the key to freedom.

I'm only interested in poetry.

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.

I try not to waste time feeling bad for myself, because when I do, there's no room for happiness.