If you don't have an idea, you can defer to someone else. It's like having a baby with someone - it's not a clone of you, but it's partly you.

To leverage those things that are common to everybody, and to present them in a way that's sort of naked, is more courageous in art than constantly trying to be evasively too cool.

You can't use irony as a way of disengaging with the difficult or emotional aspects of life.

In a certain respect, in a movie, you inevitably have a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs because that's the only practical way to get it done. When you make a record, you can still be an auteur, because you can make a whole record without anyone's help if you want.

You don't have to forego education to do anything. Even if you want to go to the NBA, you should read.

I want to have freedom of thought and expression - not get beaten down into some corporate existence, where there's so much risk of embracing the truth that you feel like you can't do it.

I want the ethic of being independent and open-minded, having a lot of integrity, intellectually, to be part of anything I do.