I've had no money, absolutely, from my family. They paid for a good education - or schools that purported to be a good education - but, um, not a dime.

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.

There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.

Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.

Mary McCarthy and that Mr. Intellectual kind of guy ... Dwight McDonald? And they were really mean about [Jerome David] Salinger, and oh they were going to destroy him, and just look how thoroughly they destroyed him! No one reads Salinger anymore!

The Cha-Cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.