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 that term. I don’t know if there’s a thing called ‘gateway books.’

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 have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, ‘Oh, this would be great in this script.’...

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.

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 are so vocal about what we hate.

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

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.

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.

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 pocket brings me right back down to earth.

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.

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

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

Everyone has expectations. You just don’t want to have them dashed, so you’re quiet about them.

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 – it might be really nice to stay in!’

It’s not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even – or rather, especially – when we’d prefer not to be.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 thing.

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

I distinguish sentiment from sentimentality. Sentimentality makes your skin crawl. It’s like too much sugar. But, sentiment is a great feeling.

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 of urgency for me in terms of, ‘Can I not say no to it for whatever reason?’

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.

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?’ People are more complicated than they appear in film or television.

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.

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.

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

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

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 actually altered after having seen it.

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.

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

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

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 would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable.

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.

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.

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

As a person, I’m anti-violence.

It never made sense to me that someone would achieve any kind of success in show business, only to become a jerk.

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 to each of them, but as the conductor, you get the fuller sound.

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.

The reflexive allergy to L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have, I feel like it’s kind of nonsense.

I like movies that are about real people in real time with real problems.

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

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

Time off from the news is always something I welcome.

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

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.

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 problematic, to say the least.