“I show up on time, I am very rigorous about scheduling, and I am very focused.”

I think, for me, when I direct my own work it’s just an extension of the authorship.

I don’t mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart

I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can’t not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops.

And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet

You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

There’s only so much pavement that the road makers lay down. After a while, the highway quits going north and it just turns into sky.

The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever.

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can’t find it with all their machines and microcameras.

It’s strange, people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can’t even answer it.

I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren’t going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.

I don’t like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.

The rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic and the best idea wins.

Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs.

I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it.

I’m not overly focused on being loved by everybody.

So you have to be more mentally focused in baseball.

I spent so much time focusing on haters that I forgot about the people that actually love me. And that’s who I’m focused on this time around: the people that want to listen. The people that don’t want to listen, don’t listen. This is for the people that want to.

I hadn’t focused on mechanics since I signed professionally.

I really played a lot this year. Sometimes it’s really hard to stay focused all the time because you’re really tired after the whole season.

So the idea of being able to shop cross-category to buy the beach bag, the summer lip gloss, and the pillows for your pool house makes it into very focused, easy life.

Usually, whatever’s in front of me is what I’m focused on and it’s 100% on that and then I kind of move from one thing to the next.

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.