“I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.”

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.

It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.

I think it gets uncomfortable when you try to act like you didn’t just tell a joke that bombed.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.

I’m not much interested in my own self when I write. I’m interested in what I observe out there, what’s going on around me.

We cannot use jihadists because it’s like shooting yourself in the foot.

Each shooting day is a big challenge, but it’s also fun.

Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

I just try to get through my to-do list, with my kids’ homework being at the top of it, and then try to prepare for the next audition or whatever scene I’m shooting next. Balance.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

In the summer of 2002, we had spent six weeks shooting the three pilots of Mythbusters, and Jamie[Hyneman] called me up afterward

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps “Oh look at that!” Then – whoosh, and I’m gone… and they’ll never see anything like it ever again… and they won’t be able to forget me – ever.