"It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well."

"Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies."

"Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist."

"In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about."

"Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home."

"Time puts things in proper perspective."

"And I liked that whole idea that energy comes from not disseminating your ideas and talking about them."

"People dance and we have a lot of music and... this might be the closet I get for a while."