To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

After all, the ordinary hero hiding in each of us is often the most powerful catalyst for change.

In the South, we tell stories. We tell stories if you're in a sales position, if you're in a retail position, you lure your customer by telling a story. You just do.

I love going back in time, and the only time you can really do that is on a movie set.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

Everybody in the South loves the one closeted homosexual who's married. It's just too funny to not have in a movie about the South. It's an epidemic. You gotta represent!

The Cruellest things do not hide in the dark.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Mr. and Mrs. Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.

The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it.

Universal deities ... never seem to smile. Not in any culture. What's the point of having omnipotence if you don't enjoy it?

The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

When Republicans used reconciliation in 2001 for the Bush tax cuts, they used it to increase the deficit. The whole purpose of reconciliation is for deficit reduction!

In America today, the percentage of children and adolescents who are defined as overweight is more than double what it was in the early 1970s.

I do have designers that I love to wear, like Philip Lim and Marc Jacobs whose stuff I know will look good on my body. But still, I always like to express myself by changing things up.

The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people