I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.

There's always the sense that you should strike while the iron's hot and while there are all these opportunities, but that's not the way I get ideas. It has to be more organic, building up through living and through experiencing things.

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.

It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.

If you read my short stories, there's a lot of sex in those in all different ways. To me, it's a really good, useful thing to get to have in a story. And in a movie, it's amazing, because you actually get to show things.

A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.

To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.