It's not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even - or rather, especially - when we'd prefer not to be.
Josh Radnor
Kindness is not about instant gratification. More often, it's akin to a low-risk investment that appreciates steadily over time.
All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.
Well, I stopped drinking. That was actually a big deal. I didn't go through any harrowing rock-bottom experience. I just made a decision to stop drinking.
No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.
I think the word 'earnest' kind of has a negative connotation on some level. I think one of the things that's happened is that being cynical is somehow conflated with being sophisticated. I think that's problematic, to say the least.
I kicked college nostalgia in my late 20s. As much as I loved college and treasure the memories, I no longer want to go back.
I distinguish sentiment from sentimentality. Sentimentality makes your skin crawl. It's like too much sugar. But, sentiment is a great feeling.
After a brief period in which I had let many a Southern Californian convince me that it was all 'in my mind,' I am once again officially allergic to dogs.
Even though I occasionally appear on it, I don't watch television.
I'll say this, and this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality: You do not want to get licked in the face repeatedly by another human being. You just don't. It's not pleasant.
When I write a film, there's a particular thing I am wrestling with and the question or concern I'm dealing with has to be big enough for me to dedicate a year or two of my life. If the question isn't big enough, or rich enough, I'll lose interest.
One man's uplift is another man's sentimental hooey.
I tend to read things that are a little more on the nourishing side. But if I don't enjoy something, I'll put it down.
What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.
I'm a little less hungry as an actor than I used to be. When you're a director, you're the conductor of the orchestra, and when you're an actor, you're playing the violin. There's a thrill to each of them, but as the conductor, you get the fuller sound.
It never made sense to me that someone would achieve any kind of success in show business, only to become a jerk.
I'm not sitting around saying, 'Man, I'd really love to direct a western.' That's just not something I'm probably going to do, mostly because I'm allergic to horses.
In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.
A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved.
It's strange to look back over a full season. Our characters have accrued all these memories, but so have we, the actors. And sometimes the character memories and the actor memories bleed into each other.
Cynicism is kind of like folding your arms and stepping back and commenting on things, like the old guys in 'The Muppets,' just throwing out comments all the time, whereas there are other people on the ground really trying to affect things and improve their lives and the lives of other people. I think it's noble and I think it's cool.
We are so vocal about what we hate.
I care about reading, a lot. It's a big part of my life.
There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can't in 22 minutes with a laugh track.
I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.
There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.
You know, I'm not saying, 'Oh, because I play a good guy on TV, I need to suddenly be villainous in a movie.' I look at it more like: does this role has a kind of urgency for me in terms of, 'Can I not say no to it for whatever reason?'
Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, 'You know, sex is a big part of people's lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?' People are more complicated than they appear in film or television.
To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.
But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.
We're like a gardener with a hose and our attention is water - we can water flowers or we can water weeds.
When I go to movies and I love the movie, it's because it feels like it articulated something about how we're living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.
I don't think evil people or negative people are inherently interesting all the time. People who are good people getting better at being themselves - to me, that's something that's really interesting to watch.
I haven't left the house without a packet of Kleenex in my back pocket for as long as I can remember. Whenever I start thinking I'm incredibly cool, the packet of Kleenex in my back pocket brings me right back down to earth.
We don't have a lot of space in our imaginations to allow people to expand what they do.
Everyone has expectations. You just don't want to have them dashed, so you're quiet about them.
I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call 'gateway books.' I just coined that term. I don't know if there's a thing called 'gateway books.'
Here's the problem: I don't like who I've become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity - it's not a conscious act, but a reflexive one.
I went through this very serious Woody Allen phase in college and a little bit after college. I still see his movies.
It really shocks me when I encounter people who think kindness doesn't matter. Because I think it's pretty much the only thing that matters.
If I'm feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone's thing.
And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.
As a person, I'm anti-violence.
I'm not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I'm told it should be good for me, I'll put it down. That said, most of what I read would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable.
There's so much nonsense tossed around about L.A. and how horrible it is and 'don't go out there' and all that stuff. So I went out to L.A. and I was pleasantly surprised.
It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.
My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.
Film allows me to ask some really big questions with the time to explore them deeply. I love the form.
