You are successful if you are able to work on the kind of material that you want to - if your life conforms to your dreams, regardless of outside acceptance or acclaim.

You're a white male living in America, brought up in one of the richest cities in the county, Palo Alto. You went to high school with Steve Jobs' daughter, and your journalism teacher is the mother-in-law of Sergey, co-founder of Google.

I become kind of obsessive about research.

Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.

I've decided I can't really control people's perceptions of me. All I can do is decide on what I work on and how hard I work on it.

I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn't even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman's take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.

I don't have many hobbies. If I think of hobbies, maybe ping pong. But I don't have a desire to get a ping pong medal.