If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.

If you have a lot of fans, you have a powerful soapbox, but you still have to have something to say when you're on that soapbox if you want to make a real difference.

What puts me in a vulnerable state? Beauty, wonder, surprise, mystery. Stuff like that.

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.

I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.

There's no hope of people paying attention to your music video if you don't let others use it.

Actually, here is something I'm passionate about that, looking around me, seems like the world at large must not care about as much as I do: craft.

I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.

I like shooting things in single takes. You have to rely on the idea itself to carry the full weight; you're always watching the idea, not the filmmaking.

It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.

Everyone loves the idea of internet fast enough that HD movies download in seconds, but if only the telecoms or their partners get to use the high speeds, it's not the internet: It's glorified cable.

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while.

For the unlearned old age is winter for the learned it is the season of the harvest.

When you go through a negative situation, don't think about it. Make it positive.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.

Studying economics is not a good preparation for dealing with it.

The common man is impelled and controlled by interests; the superior, by ideas.

I feel a lot more comfortable on stage in the theatre. It just reminds me of being a kid and doing pantomimes.

My uncle's a lawyer and I remember going to see him in court and thinking, 'That's cool, too bad I could never be a lawyer.'

Often you read something about yourself, and either you've been ironic, and that doesn't work in print, or it paraphrases something that you said, and has a different meaning.