I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.

There's no need to be tragic or destroy yourself or jump off a cliff. That's no longer the paradigm I wish to follow, or that anyone should follow. It is not necessary to be tragic. It's bullshit that women can't have it all. Why not? Other people do.

There was a lot of anger among critics that I had not made a sexy movie.

At any age you can start over. You have to drop the idea of where you should be in your career. And you have to do without a lot of love. Not everyone's going to love you.

I remember being really interested in the sad parts of Los Angeles, of which there are many, and knowing we weren't up in the citadel on the hill, but we also weren't on the bottom. I was very interested in the poetry of failure as a child.

My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films.

It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.