The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.

I think, in fact, there's a plus and a minus to knowing my prior work, Happiness and so forth. The plus is of course you can see how I play with the characters, the storylines, and the way things play off each other. And the minus is that it makes you a little bit more self-conscious, that you're not able to enter the movie as it exists and lives and breathes, because you're so busy making references, connections that you're not able to release yourself from and take the film on your own terms.

What makes me angry is the idea that people would be going to a movie because of what I said about it. It makes me feel, I don't know, arrogant, self-important, self-aggrandizing, whatever. Like I'm being used.

I think success is a lot more healthy than failure.

I've always said that I myself am not the best audience for my own work, because I'm just not that receptive to comedy.

If I grew up in a different background, I could see myself getting a gun and shooting an abortionist. That's my job, to imagine what could happen, what can make people go in different directions.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.