There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can't in 22 minutes with a laugh track.

One man's uplift is another man's sentimental hooey.

I have really good female friends. I've never bought the whole men-and-women-can't-be-friends thing. I think that's sort of nonsense.

One thing I'm most proud of, in my movies, is that I think the performances are super-strong, but that's not all me. I think part of it is casting appropriately.

And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.

To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.

There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.