There’s something melancholy about professors because they’re chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It’s like they’re chronically abandoned.

It’s really hard to be poor in New York – I was really poor when I lived in New York.

One man’s uplift is another man’s sentimental hooey.

A lot of times, we’re just sold these movies that are really cynically conceived and marketed, and they just want you there opening weekend, before everybody finds out it’s not so good.

Kindness is not about instant gratification. More often, it’s akin to a low-risk investment that appreciates steadily over time.

But, yeah, I’m really happy when I’m writing. When I’m being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you...

All of the things I used to obsess over, I’m no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they’re a little more existential or cosmic.

As a person, I’m anti-violence.

In college, you’re kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.

After a brief period in which I had let many a Southern Californian convince me that it was all ‘in my mind,’ I am once again officially allergic to dogs.

We’re like a gardener with a hose and our attention is water – we can water flowers or we can water weeds.

I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call ‘gateway books.’ I just coined...

My trick is the trick that everyone knows: Work really hard and prepare.

Even though I occasionally appear on it, I don’t watch television.

There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can’t in 22 minutes with a laugh track.

It’s strange to look back over a full season. Our characters have accrued all these memories, but so have we, the actors. And sometimes the character memories and the actor memories bleed into each other.

Cynicism is kind of like folding your arms and stepping back and commenting on things, like the old guys in ‘The Muppets,’ just throwing out comments all the time, whereas there are other people on...

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you’re at and you’ll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

And as a filmmaker, I’m trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don’t believe that.

Film allows me to ask some really big questions with the time to explore them deeply. I love the form.

We don’t have a lot of space in our imaginations to allow people to expand what they do.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what’s the purpose of reading, and maybe that it’s not that cool to hate something just because it’s popular.

An obsessive attention to the news, I’ve realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.

I’m a little less hungry as an actor than I used to be. When you’re a director, you’re the conductor of the orchestra, and when you’re an actor, you’re playing the violin. There’s a thrill...

I’m not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I’m told it should be good for me, I’ll put it down. That said, most of what I read...

I actually have a thing about proper nouns. They clang on my ear in a weird way when I hear them dropped into movies.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It’s more ‘thematically personal’ – what’s up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

Well, I stopped drinking. That was actually a big deal. I didn’t go through any harrowing rock-bottom experience. I just made a decision to stop drinking.

I haven’t left the house without a packet of Kleenex in my back pocket for as long as I can remember. Whenever I start thinking I’m incredibly cool, the packet of Kleenex in my back...

I’m not sitting around saying, ‘Man, I’d really love to direct a western.’ That’s just not something I’m probably going to do, mostly because I’m allergic to horses.

You know, I’m not saying, ‘Oh, because I play a good guy on TV, I need to suddenly be villainous in a movie.’ I look at it more like: does this role has a kind...

I care about reading, a lot. It’s a big part of my life.

If I’m feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone’s...

When I go to movies and I love the movie, it’s because it feels like it articulated something about how we’re living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel...

A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout – rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story – but the chord has to be resolved.

Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, ‘You know, sex is a big part of people’s lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?’...

I find myself going out less and less. When you’re 22 and see older people start to do that, it’s depressing, but once you hit 30, you think, ‘Wow, I’ve been working all week –...

I have really good female friends. I’ve never bought the whole men-and-women-can’t-be-friends thing. I think that’s sort of nonsense.

Acting on stage is still my favorite thing to do. And everyone who’s been in musicals knows that there is nothing more fun.

Here’s the problem: I don’t like who I’ve become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity – it’s...

There’s so much nonsense tossed around about L.A. and how horrible it is and ‘don’t go out there’ and all that stuff. So I went out to L.A. and I was pleasantly surprised.

When I write a film, there’s a particular thing I am wrestling with and the question or concern I’m dealing with has to be big enough for me to dedicate a year or two of...

I sometimes don’t know what I’m writing when I start writing it, on some level.

I kicked college nostalgia in my late 20s. As much as I loved college and treasure the memories, I no longer want to go back.

I don’t think evil people or negative people are inherently interesting all the time. People who are good people getting better at being themselves – to me, that’s something that’s really interesting to watch.

To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.

I’ll say this, and this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality: You do not want to get licked in the face repeatedly by another human being. You just don’t. It’s not pleasant.

I went through this very serious Woody Allen phase in college and a little bit after college. I still see his movies.

I learned a lesson which I didn’t heed: Don’t put yourself in your movies. It’s too much.

I think the word ‘earnest’ kind of has a negative connotation on some level. I think one of the things that’s happened is that being cynical is somehow conflated with being sophisticated. I think that’s...