In the past, 'Avatar' would have won because Oscar voters loved to hand out awards to big productions, like 'Ben-Hur.' Today it's fashionable to give the Oscar to a small movie that nobody saw.

I can do five things at once. I'm tapping my foot, I'm opening my mouth and talking to you, and looking at the bulletin board.

When I was in college, I was an English major, but I was part of this great group at Stanford called the Company. We didn't know any better, so we did it all; we did King Lear, we did Hamlet, new plays ... And we did it all in a covered wagon that we took around the Bay Area. We all put our makeup on in one cracked mirror. It was the most fun I've ever had.

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.

I've always been very shy and sheltered; I think it was a good way of starting to communicate with people. I was taught as a child never to talk about myself, never to talk about my emotions. Of course, now I talk about myself constantly. Now I have to take reverse est.

I am a person who goes out without a purse. I put things in my coat pockets, so I don't have any accessories.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.