Quotes from Spike Jonze

Maurice Sendak never - I remember he said something that was very striking because it's something I never thought about. I always loved his work, and he said, 'I don't really view myself as a children's book author. I just try and write about childhood as honestly as I can.'

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

Johnny Knoxville went from struggling to pay his rent to being on the cover of 'Rolling Stone' in the course of, like, a month.

I always aspire to that, where it feels like the film was made by the characters as opposed to the filmmakers. I try to be invisible.

Chris Cooper I got to work with many times.

Don't differentiate between "This is a job" and "This is what I'm doing for fun." It's all simultaneous.

I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own.

If I leave my phone in the car and go to dinner or something for a few hours, I'm very proud of myself.

Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?

I would love to make video games.

The best videos were the ones where I became friends with the artists first.

Obviously, movies and music videos are different because they're different lengths, and in a movie, you have more time to explore an idea. But I feel like they're all the same, really.

I respect people that are die-hard film people, but I started on video. I started on Hi8 video and mini-DV, and I made skate videos. So, I love film, and I love the way it looks, but I also love the way crappy video looks, or VHS. I've always been a fan of whatever the look is that's appropriate for what the feeling is.

The Beastie Boys are guys I loved before I met them, and when I got to know them, we started a magazine together, and we started making videos together, and a lot of it came out of us just cracking ourselves up, like going to the fake mustache store and buying fake mustaches.

Me and my friends had BMX magazines and skate magazines, and I was a photographer who made skate videos.

There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'

Felt is not the easiest thing to animate. It's very flimsy.

Be willing to get fired for a good idea.

I just want to make whatever is exciting.