Comedy comes easily to me, and so for me, comedy is suspect.

I don't believe in jogging. It extends your life - but by exactly the amount of time you spend jogging.

I secrete jokes like the pancreas secretes... whatever the pancreas secretes.

If I weren't a film maker, I'd probably be a handyman.

New York and Los Angeles are really one city, and the rest of the country is America.

O.K., helplessness is repugnant to me, as a father, as a piece of protoplasm. My parents were activists. I don't believe you can't do anything.

Wanting to be a screenwriter is like wanting to be a co-pilot.

After college, rather than pursue real work, I joined a folk group and sang in coffee houses and nightclubs, an occupation that does little for the intellect and even less for the complexion.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

I now believe that there's only a certain amount of good luck in the world, and so if something good happens to me, that means something bad has to happen to somebody, somewhere.

I think there's just too much comedy. Sometimes I get requests from people: 'How do I get into comedy?' And I always say that what we need is more people in health care. And less people in comedy.

Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry.

There is a pool of references in New York and Los Angeles that are almost exclusively drawn from the media, from the world of television and advertising.

You can't really think about more than one movie at a time. You're thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head, you don't get any ideas in the shower.