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" I like things that are sort of comic and humorous rather than satirical. "

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" The only way to end up in the perfect future is to invent it yourself. "

" When people are telling stories on screen, you can show the reactions of people, play it off those reactions, and it can be fun. But when it's someone just giving an opinion on things, even if the opinion is kind of interesting, that is potentially deadly. It has to be really quick. "

" I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep. "

" I love writing novels, but I'm very fearful about writing something from absolute scratch. I kind of don't have the time to write something from scratch. I think when my knees completely give out, and I can't make films anymore, I would try to write novels from scratch. "

" One of the reasons it's important to make a new project is it always seems to improve the reputations of the previous one. Whatever you did before is better than what you've just done, apparently. But I've had to follow the first rule of journalism: Never read the comments. "

" My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books. "

" There are bad preppies and bad priests and bad humanitarians. Any group can have its bad apple. "

" I have to embrace the fact people find me divisive, but I find it remarkable. I was very disturbed by the hatred 'Damsels in Distress' received. "

" One of the downsides of money is if there's no money, there are very few real jerks who are attached to your project. And if there is money, you do attract some very difficult, unhelpful people. "

" There's certain key dance crazes that are just so much fun - wouldn't that be a great thing to do, to invent a dance? "

" I identify entirely with Jane Austen's point of view, on everything. "

" It's really important to have subjects that people all over the world are familiar with, and the Disney films are really great that way. "

" With all my films, the pace is not very fast, and so people get bored with them and comment that they're just people talking in rooms and all that. "

" Sometimes, people who are very fastidious about what they're going to do in their work are not very fastidious in their private life. I'm like that. I love it when people do really nice things around me, but I don't have time to do it for myself. It's very hard for me to even buy a new pair of trousers. "

" I was in Paris for nine years, starting in '98. One of the great things when I was first there were these wonderful CD collections, selling for almost nothing. For ten euros, you'd get three CDs of all the Gershwin songs. "

" Producers have a tendency to put you in a pigeonhole: 'What does this white, middle-aged preppy know about 1960s Kingston?' "

" Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic. "

" Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies. "

" I really like the short stories that Melissa Bank writes. I think she's sort of channeling the female version of J.D. Salinger in more recent days. "

" I think when my parents were together, my family was too prosperous for our psychological health. Not that they were that rich, but I feel that usually inherited wealth causes psychological problems. "

" I'm totally devoted to '30s cinema. "

" My guilty pleasure is watching the Investigation Discovery channel. "

" I fell for a Spanish woman and followed her to Spain. We got married there, and then I got involved in the Spanish film industry and got the material for 'Barcelona.' It was my way of breaking into the film industry. "

" There's so much of this thing now, where you're supposed to do all the work before you get the commission. I think it's really good to try to resist that. If you just have a week to come up with a pitch for something, your ideas aren't going to be very good. Get your income from somewhere else, and keep your writing not tied into these contracts. "

" Paris is the destination for brokenhearted American women. I think men go there and have their hearts broken, but women come there with their hearts broken. "

" What I like and find liberating in dialogue comedy is that the characters, and what they say, are not me. These are fleeting thoughts and observations and not presented as truths but as something that illuminates the character and the dynamic between the characters. This kind of dialogue is thesis and antithesis - and we never get to a synthesis. "

" I think one thing that makes me delay projects more than other people is, I see this silver lining in a turn-down. Maybe if I just wrote a script and then pounded my head against all the doors, I would be shooting more films. "

" A very sad moment for me was when my parents separated - a lot of crying, 'It's tragic, we're now a broken family, blah blah blah blah blah' - although my psychological problems stopped. I actually felt healthier. "

" My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around. "

" So much of selling a film in the industry is about creating a fulcrum where all the pressure comes to bear, and something seems suddenly valuable and approved by an audience. It's amazing how people could pick up tons of films on the cheap, but they don't because they wait until everything is laid out for them. "