Zoe Kazan

“I almost never write because I want something from my audience. Almost everything I've ever written, I've written because I feel like I have to write this or I'll die. Like, this has to come out of me.”

“I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.”

“If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.”

“You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.”

“I encourage everyone to read James Baldwin and Malcom X and Aldous Huxley. To read Primo Levi. To read 'Silent Spring.' To read Toni Morrison. To read Zora Neale Hurston.”

“I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.”

“Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.”

“I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.”

“When 'Ruby Sparks' came out, I had to do so many interviews where I had to explain the film and my politics. And I think there was a willful misunderstanding by some people. They thought the movie was trying to perpetrate the thing the movie was deconstructing.”

“I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.”

“In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.”

“I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.”

“I do feel like I have the superpower of not caring about my body as an actor.”

“But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.”

“I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to 'This American Life' more times than I can count!”

“Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.”

“Well, I have a sister that I'm very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period.”

“Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.”

“My hero is Michelle Williams, who I grew close to when we did 'Meek's Cutoff.' She's an extraordinary actor and mom.”

“Every role requires its own set of tools, and I think, because of that, it is very hard to ever feel totally prepared or totally able.”