If I read something somebody wrote 300 years ago, and it's me, what I'm going through now in my head, it sends chills down my spine, and I feel like that's what I want to be able to offer — that if I offer myself, there's a chance somebody else will feel connected.

CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.

I choose to write characters from the inside because I feel like that's the way I'm gonna get the most honest version of them.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.