I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

There's a victory in letting go of your expectations.

I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

I don't feel the breath of a thousand people over my shoulder.

People who write books - they live in their own world as they're writing. But people who are doing shows or big movies - not only are you writing this world that you're living in, but you're also simultaneously running a circus, and you can kind of start losing your mind like that.

I've never been to the Oscars, but if I was ever invited to the Oscars, I would have this weird paranoia of terrorism. It just feels like The Poseidon Adventure, everyone in their tuxes. Somehow, I feel like the whole time I would be looking for where the nearest exit was, and in a cold sweat about some kind of man-made disaster, like a terrorist strike or something. It seems like such a scary, claustrophobic proposition.

People don't go to see things in the theater for the same reasons that I do. And movies are about mass audiences. And so moviegoers are going for a different kind of drug than for a certain kind of literary quality.