My mom is the backbone not just of my family but of many families.

Adversity has a way of introducing a man to himself.

I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.

I got accepted at Yale but never went.

I'm constantly jumping off cliffs and developing my wings on the way down. ... It's a gamble, a ... spiritual gamble. You are who you choose to be.

I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist. You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, and he's f***ed. There's no way for him to exist in that world... Lars Von Trier's dangerous. He scares me. And I'm only going to work now when I'm terrified.