Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Thy life is safe while any god saves mine.

The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it.

I hope that all of us who were fortunate enough to have benefited will put our time, our resources and our efforts into making sure that kids, particularly kids without means, have a way to achieve.

The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be.

I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

The simpler it is, the better I like it.

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.

Those are the movies that we [with Evan Goldberg] always wanted to make. Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, the kind of movies where violence and comedy and characters kind of work together really well.