I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.

All the women are going around saying, "Oh, we're just friends, we're just friends," but the guy's going, "Yeah, we're friends, but as soon as she breaks up with her boyfriend, I'm hoping to move in."

Your friends are really an extension of your vision of the world. It's kind of a physical manifestation of how you feel. Like your soul.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

If the animators could hide something so secretly that I could watch it numerous times, both on the computer and on the screen, and not pick up on it, then it deserves to be in the movie. But if they had more overt things, I'd often tell them to cut it out. In general, as long as they captured the spirit of the character, then they're fine. But sometimes it took a while, and we had to replace a lot of animators.

That's the history of art - you have to consider yourself fortunate if you ever get acknowledged. If you have a critical success that's also a financial success and that you feel good about... If things line up, that's pretty rare.

When you're trying to get laid, everything's great, but once you've been with someone eight years and the future is not finite, you have time to sit and really examine every little thing that irritates you.