What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment.

We are all just little dolls of ourselves. Who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us.

In L.A., you can put out a craft-service table anywhere, and it's no big deal. But in New York, people who walk by it on the street get really angry about it.

I always doodled as a kid while I was talking on the phone or watching TV.

It's usually drawing on personal experience. I don't think I could dig deep enough trying to get into somebody else's life. Like 'Far From Me' - I wrote it about this waitress that I was dating when I was fifteen or so, and she broke up with me.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

I am not going to talk about my personal life anymore. You have to learn that lesson sometime.

I think I subconsciously knew you needed life experience to direct, and the best films are directed by people who have really lived, with exceptions like Orson Welles, who just burst out of the gate. There are prodigies like that, but for me, personally, I thought I needed life experience.