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.