Josh Radnor

“I kicked college nostalgia in my late 20s. As much as I loved college and treasure the memories, I no longer want to go back.”

“I distinguish sentiment from sentimentality. Sentimentality makes your skin crawl. It's like too much sugar. But, sentiment is a great feeling.”

“If I'm feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone's thing.”

“After a brief period in which I had let many a Southern Californian convince me that it was all 'in my mind,' I am once again officially allergic to dogs.”

“I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.”

“There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.”

“An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.”

“I think the word 'earnest' kind of has a negative connotation on some level. I think one of the things that's happened is that being cynical is somehow conflated with being sophisticated. I think that's problematic, to say the least.”

“I care about reading, a lot. It's a big part of my life.”

“What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.”

“We're like a gardener with a hose and our attention is water - we can water flowers or we can water weeds.”

“When I write a film, there's a particular thing I am wrestling with and the question or concern I'm dealing with has to be big enough for me to dedicate a year or two of my life. If the question isn't big enough, or rich enough, I'll lose interest.”

“But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.”

“It's not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even - or rather, especially - when we'd prefer not to be.”

“It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.”

“All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.”

“And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.”

“I'll say this, and this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality: You do not want to get licked in the face repeatedly by another human being. You just don't. It's not pleasant.”

“We don't have a lot of space in our imaginations to allow people to expand what they do.”

“I went through this very serious Woody Allen phase in college and a little bit after college. I still see his movies.”