Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

I love music, right? I can't say "I'm only going to listen to a physical medium," because there's a bunch of meaningful records that as a music fan I love that I would've never been able to access. So if I want to be part of something I have to get dragged along with technology.

I used to watch a lot of documentaries about Satanic possession - and I don't know if this is racist or not - but in the documentaries, it never happened to Americans! It was always happening in Central America or South America; that's where the priest was always going down to exorcise possessed people. So I didn't have a lot of fear of being possessed by the devil.

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.

If I'm around spiders, my fear isn't so much the spider, but my fear is that I'm somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.

You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we're simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.