I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.

Dogs don't just like us, they love us, and they admire us. The big reason they admire us is we invented cars. They're like, "Yes, we get to go somewhere!" Go somewhere faster, with their head out the window, and their ears, like, "Yes! Yes!"

When I was four, I was a kind of sky worshipper. I would look at the sky, and I wanted to evaporate into the sky - I loved the sky. I loved looking at the trees, just because they touched the sky.

You can do great things with low-tech stuff.

I didn't really understand that Vipassana is a relatively new form of Buddhism that was based on the storage of pain. So the idea is that every time you don't scream, that's your Buddhist side.

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.