I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic post-comet post-whatever it was so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

The thing about For Better or Worse is the only thing that made me an okay director for that is that I have a sense of humor and it was supposed to be funny.

I hope I'm in a position to make stuff that I really want to make as opposed to stuff that I just have to make for money reasons or to sustain a certain marquee value.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question.

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within.

I'm just like so many women - I was frustrated I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on and you get home and you think 'What am I really supposed to wear under this?' So it was a frustrated consumer moment.

My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.