You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.

Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open.

If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.

All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.

You come out of each movie just thinking, "God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right."

Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.

Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

And when the mood took her to fall for the handsome young lawyer Will Bankhead, she happily threw over the man to whom she was already engaged.

I am strong, but I am tired, Stephen, tired of always having to be the strong one, of always having to do the right thing.

My dad believes in God, I think. I'm not sure if my mom does. I don't.

Ah, current music. What would that be? Ah, really, a lot of it sounds defective to me. It makes me restless.

I'd kind of expected that kids who knew about the Real World wouldn't act like jock dipwads. Guess I was wrong.

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist's office would be full of luminous ideas.

One hundred and ten years from now no one who is here now will be alive.

The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.

There are a lot of young, well-educated, artistic people out there that like to be entertained.

Some men make gain a fountain, whence proceeds A stream of liberal and heroic deeds; The swell of pity, not to be confined Within the scanty limits of the mind.