Zoe Kazan

“You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.”

“I don't want to do every independent film offered to me.”

“I love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.”

“I'm used to very low-budget situations. In 'The Exploding Girl,' we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.”

“When my first play was produced, I had this sudden feeling that I feel powerful. Like, the next time I go into an audition room, and it's me and the same eight girls as always, I will have this thing that no one can take away from me. They can see us all as interchangeable. But I am not interchangeable.”

“When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.”

“The causes for my eating disorder ran along the usual lines: depression, an inability to express my rage, a desire to exert control, a desire to feel less, a desire to have my body express the things my voice could not. That, and I had gotten in the habit of believing it was better to take up less space.”

“I think a famous parent is really different from a famous grandparent. My parents are very successful, but no one knows who they are, and they live a completely grounded, homey life. I'm friends with the Gummer girls, whose mum is Meryl Streep, and that feels from the outside like a different kind of burden.”

“If I didn't find art valuable, I would stop doing my work and only work for justice.”

“I wasn't raised in a family that cared about how you look. The fact that I have made my living in acting, where that matters, that really feels antithetical to me as a person.”

“I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.”

“Maybe this is a way of gaslighting myself, but I think of it this way: In certain circles, my grandpa was considered to be one of the seminal directors of the 20th century. I'm never going to be that. So I might as well do whatever I want.”

“I'm a very serious person. Unfortunately, sometimes.”

“And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never... I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.”

“I want to derive pleasure from this planet and put pleasure back into it.”

“That moment in 'Broadcast News' where Holly Hunter is told how great it is to be the smartest person in the room, and she cries and says it's awful - I definitely have moments like that sometimes, moments when introspection and drive can be lonely-making. And it doesn't help that I have a partner who is very work-oriented.”

“I really love people. I love to meet people. I'm curious about people.”

“There's something really earnest inside me all the time. It's not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who's not wired the way I'm wired.”

“And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.”

“I never wanted to be a playwright.”