Quotes from Greta Gerwig

I always have a soft spot in my heart for New York designers and independent designers, people who are doing the fashion equivalent of what I'm trying to do in film.

I get nerdy and nervous around not only great actors, but great directors and DPs I love.

I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children.

I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.

The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.

I just don't feel like I've seen very many movies about 17-year-old girls where the question is not, 'Will she find the right guy' or 'Will he find her?' The question should be, 'Is she going to occupy her personhood?' Because I think we're very unused to seeing female characters, particularly young female characters, as people.

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

I have very intense feelings of joy or sadness. I used to not like that so much because I was worried it was girly, and I wanted to be more stoic. I think this happens a lot. When you're 16, there are qualities you wish you didn't have, and then when you're 30, you're like, 'Thank God I have that; otherwise, I'd be living less vividly.'

Specifically with directors I'd worked with, and even some that I haven't, they were all incredibly generous with me, having really long conversations about what they felt was useful as tips.

I always feel like a vague failure in L.A. - it always makes me feel like I should somehow be different than I am. And I don't know why.

I think it's really hard to work in a city where you live too, because I get so absorbed with the movie that I become a bad friend and a bad participant in my own life.

Using the energy in a scene can really cut the fat off of something and streamline it. It can make it work for you and activate it for you in a way.

I don't do well when I don't work.

From Noah Baumbach, I learned to have a strict no cell phone policy on set. There is nothing that bums you out more than looking over and seeing somebody on their smartphone, and that goes for actors and everyone else.

Getting bad reviews or doing something that's not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that I've earned my stripes a bit.

When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.

Books and theater were the way I understood the world and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life.

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27, it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

It's really hard for me to be around people I admire.

Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don't sit in the same room when we write. We're always writing alone anyway.

I can say I'm a relationship person, and I like relationships. I think I also like relationships because then you don't have to date because dating is horrible.