There's a few people who I've accumulated over the years who I really trust to show a first cut to and to be helpful rather than unhelpful.

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

I don't think fast enough on my feet in terms of the writing to change the script too much when I'm shooting it. I like to have it set and done and know that I feel good about it and I might add a few lines here and there while we're shooting, if I think of a new joke, I might toss it in, but for the most part, I try to stick to the written script and have all the latitude exist within that.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to. And often seem to write about situations that are too big for the characters.

When you have people like Casey [Affleck] and Michelle Williams and they want to do more takes you don't say, "Sorry, that's it." And I also don't like to say, "It's fine, it's great." Unless it's clearly there.

Little kids grow up discovering the world that's shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.