What happened to your hand? It got hit by a mirror. How'd that happen? I lost my temper at myself.

Mostly with commercial work, it isn't about personal vision. It's not a personal effort, it's work for hire. That's more my attitude with those. You just want to be a professional worker.

People often call and say: "Can you help me to get Bill Murray in our movie." But I'm always like, "well I don't know how to do that!" I've sometimes tried and not been able to get him but then I'll suddenly be very surprised by the thing that he will suddenly decide to do.

Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.

It's not usually that great of an idea to read lots of reviews of your movies, because even if somebody's saying nice things, there'll still be something in there that pushes the wrong button, and it's not really that helpful.

I just now put [Robert Altman] down feeling heartbroken but happily and deeply inspired. . . . Wonderful.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.