Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

Hope keeps you alive.

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.

I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.

A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.

I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature.

Halloween is a day when we all get to fool people into thinking we're someone else. Or as Mitt Romney calls it, campaigning.

Setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.

Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.

Not only is the West so successful economically, but it leads the world scientifically, and culturally.

The more we're doing to ensure we're following our joy and passion, that's when we really start to put the gas in our lives.

My wife has a whim of iron.

Fortunately, when you're a mom, the responsibility of caring for your child can keep you going.

I don't go to games as much as I used to because of the NFL's Sunday Ticket. So I'll watch the games, take notes.