The elegance of staying with a moment, without needing to stop and change all the lighting, made [the alternative] seem lazy and indulgent.

I've already spent a lot of my life doing what makes me go. There's a life out there while I'm still young, able to move, able to just sit at peace in the water - I should be spending much more time doing that, rather than continuing to go through this artistic struggle.

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?

When I was very small, I had that first-time-you-see-a-play experience, which immediately made me want to act, because it seemed like this incredible outlet for something I was already doing fairly compulsively anyway, which was putting on hats and costumes and doing funny voices. It was a very natural compulsion for me.

People think because I went to Yale that that implies privilege, and it is a privilege in the sense that it's an incredible opportunity.