I find it really disturbing to be watching a lot of the medium that I'm trying to work in. I prefer to be doing things that are farther away.

One of the problems of a director on the set is that we become overwhelmed by all the factors and threads of production, that sometimes we can't focus on our main job, which is steering the performances to create the whole film.

I'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.

I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.

[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.