It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?

Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.

When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.

Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.

I don't make films, and because I don't make films, I'm not an expert in the craft of bringing a film into the world, how you put its various pieces together. But where I feel like I'm an expert is my own feelings in response to a film.

I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling bad because somebody else did. Now I'm not so sure of either.

Whenever we feel shame, it's a mark of some deep investment or deep internal struggle.

Shame doesn't exist as an emotion without the projected or perceived sense of judgment coming from somewhere else.

If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there's some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.