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Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.

I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained; he can be disciplined.

Bill Hader does a really good impression of me.

Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.

I think I have a natural, if I can say that, got a kind of natural ability in comedy.

I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

We've all been influenced by American naturalism, and to ignore that entirely would be impossible for me as someone who works primarily in film.