Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

Doing abominations is against the law, particularly if the abominations are done while wearing a lobster bib.

End production today. Wrap party as usual a little sad. Slow danced with Scarlett. Broke her toe. Not my fault. When she dipped me back, I stepped on it. Penélope [Cruz] and Javier [Bardem] anxious to work with me again. Said if I ever come up with another screenplay to try and find them. Goodbye drink with Rebecca [Hall]. Sentimental moment. Everyone in cast and crew chipped in and bought me a ballpoint pen.

Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

The comedies are not a million laughs on the set. Its business and the dramas are business as well, really. When I'm writing it I struggle more with drama because I started out in comedy.

Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.