I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.

Fame is very corrosive and you have to guard very strictly against it.

Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful.

I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

I start to get fixated on a story and a character and an idea, and at a certain point, I really want to do it. It's a compulsion to explore a specific thing, as opposed to a compulsion to direct, generally speaking.

This place [USA] is exploding with young people who are - they're like Nietzsche's hammer - going to break everything and make something better. The creative energy in this country, and what people are coming up with is very hopeful.