“Growing up, I wasn’t an athlete or anything like that. The only place I felt like I belonged was in the theater.”

I ended up having a kid very young, and it put things in perspective.

I always wanted to have a career that would keep me at home in New York so I can work in the theater all the time and be involved in the creative process from the ground up.

I try to have all my characters have a sense of humor. To me the most interesting thing is a desperate character. I think desperation is funny.

. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there’s always a positive to a negative.

The secret of growing younger is counting blessings, not birthdays.

I was growing up with a single mom who’d be at work when I came home from school. So I’d just turn on the TV. I grew up watching old Clint Eastwood westerns. I adopted him as one of my male role models.

It was a great time to grow up in Chicago. It was the mid-80s, and we had the 85 Bears and the Michael Jordan era.

Growing up, my fascination was all things dinosaur, and as an adult, I’ve had some success making films about aliens, so this is a dream come true.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself.

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning.

Well, you know what grown-ups are,’ said Dinah. ‘They don’t think the same way as we do.