Noah Baumbach

“When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.”

“'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.”

“I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.”

“There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.”

“I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I'll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.”

“A lot of black-and-white films generally have a color version that will be used for TV.”

“Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.”

“I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.”

“I suppose some studio executive would say it's death for a comedy if people aren't all laughing in the same places, but I find with my movies that people laugh in very different places. I can't control it.”

“I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.”

“It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials.”

“I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.”

“I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.”

“To this day, I have people I might meet who will make assumptions about my life based on fictional elements of 'The Squid And The Whale.' But I think that's par for the course if you make something that feels kind of real.”

“I've run into more people walking in L.A. than if I drove. Because you stand out so much if you walk. People from my past have stopped their cars and said, 'Hey!' But if I was in a car, they never would've seen me.”

“There's always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.”

“I've always liked working with friends or, you know, people I have outside relationships with.”

“I'm a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it's something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.”