I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.

Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

You may not be able to control the whole world, but you may learn to control your inner world through yoga.

Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.

A mind that is characterized by unrest will not be tranquil even in the presence of great calm.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

Flippancy may be a lance tilted in the face of fear.

Luis Suarez is a victim of his own make-up

If you ever thought you were ugly, Los Angeles is the place to come and find out you were right.

It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.

The words loved me and I loved them in return.