I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.

Time wounds all heals.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.