The entire culture was organized for people who are happy. People who are miserable need reassurance that other people are miserable.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

I don't think I've ever stolen anything.

The truth is, I just don't have that much time to see movies. So if I get two hours where I can actually see a film, I don't want to go backwards, I want to go forwards.

I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.