I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.

I grew up going to the movies, not watching them on television, so I'm still a bit resistant to TV as a medium.

I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

It's not a character flaw to become an adult.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.

Little kids grow up discovering the world that's shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.

Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.

There's something about the impact of a big screen that means something to me, even though I realize almost every film is fated to be seen for a year in theaters, and then forever after on television.