I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.

When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot. 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 don't keep regular hours.

I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, 'Well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.'

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

I don't see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.

Books don’t change lives... People change lives... Sometimes, if you’re lucky, if you get the thing right, a book can say some important things and that’s all fine and good... but a book is just an artifact... a thing that sits on a desk or a shelf... People make the real difference... People and love...

I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can’t find it with all their machines and microcameras.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years.