What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

I don't put big concepts on my work, and it's all often about keeping actors in a room together and not letting them leave.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

I've never really felt that I've had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.