This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else.

I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.

I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.

I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.

She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.

When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.

Collections are certainly abundant online. It's complicated, because it's not like these people didn't want computers, although there was some nonchalance about it. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed if they wished they had a computer, and in a lot of cases, it was like they couldn't process the question. You don't know what you don't have, I guess.