I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant, so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

You definitely meet a lot of extremely powerful, successful, wealthy people in Hollywood who are extremely miserable.

Juno MacGuff: I don't know what kind of girl I am.

You hear the term "staying grounded" a lot when you're coming up in the movie industry and it's the one word I don't really understand because it implies being tethered almost and I don't like that. Why stay grounded? You might as well become a complete eccentric, float off into the sky and burn yourself on the sun and go crazy.

Hollywood is a perpetual summerland, a temperate, godless yaw where the very word 'season' has been co-opted by television executives. There are few harbingers of winter here.

I don't know if I have some kind of defiance disorder or something, but if I'm hired to write something by "The Man," or by a studio, for whatever reason, it's really hard for me to finish. I inevitably wind up using that time to write something else.

I've been so lucky - I worked with Jason Reitman twice, who has always been a really strong advocate for my voice, and has always really respected the scripts that I've brought him and is just the coolest.