You gotta strike while the iron's hot.

I want every character be an outsider in some way.

We just happened to come along at time where there hadn't been a new young adult drama that also could appeal to adults as well in quite some time. We sort of found a little bit of a niche.

As The O.C. started up again, I started to feel myself potentially getting pulled away.

There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama.

We don't hold anything back. We go for broke, and if we have a good idea for a story line, we just use it because you never know and because the dynamics of the show are going to change.

You gotta strike while the iron's hot.

If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.

I am the kind of person that takes everything as is and then look at it from the outside looking in.

You have to act like a responsible professional in the industry regardless of your age.

Ten-year plan? No, three-year plan! I'm in a hurry.

There's got to be a little bit of reality show fatigue happening.

Certainly there's got to be a little bit of reality show fatigue happening.

The trap is that you then just start doing stuff about Hollywood, which I don't really want to do.

It is my goal to learn as much about the people I'm surrounded by. I am slowly widening who I am close with, and at the same time, growing further away from others.

I'd started working when I was 21 and had been very determined about my career, very focused, even as a little kid, so it was something I had been working at for a long time.

The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.

The best years are behind me.

Year Two is a critical year for any television show.

It's really hard in this day and age, with radio and MTV being so consolidated, to get new music out there. I think we've become a really legitimate, viable avenue for getting new music out there.

Last year, at the beginning of the year, we couldn't get arrested, so I'll take this. Feast versus famine.

The support that we have from the network in terms of watching us at an unusual time in the year and playing our episodes three times in a given week until we built an audience... is exceptional.

I think our show is very different from Orange County.

Certainly the experiences of Seth and his relationship to his parents and his point of view of the world are very similar to my own and very much based on my experiences at the University of Southern California.

The press always ends up being much nicer than I expect. A lot of times they say something snarky about you, but then you meet them in person and they couldn't be nicer.

I think you're only as good as the work that you do.

It's my experience that the fluidity of sexuality with younger people is more accepted.

Like they said about The West Wing, you can't do a show about Washington until you can.

The girls in high school who watched 90210? I was watching Seinfeld.

He was conservative in the old fashioned sense of cautious.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of joy that kills.

While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.

Being able to do research in a real-time way is the way research needs to be done in the future.

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

I have become quite good at repurposing and reusing much of what comes into the house. The goal is to generate as little waste as possible.

Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.

Feminism means something - legislation, cultural change - but 'Girl Power' meant nothing more than being friends with your friends.

I really, really missed the Pennsylvania countryside and hills.

I'm totally Italian, but I'm not a diva. If you could see the way I'm dressed in daily life, that's not a diva. Appearances are so not important to me.

If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, do not accept, as you may lose a friend.

Friends give me a hard time about the pants I'm wearing, which are made in China. Well, how do you find the right clothes? Or the right movie studio? The right people giving you checks? Good luck doing the right thing all the time.

I believe in the old, because it shows us where we come from - where our souls have risen from. And I believe in the new, because it gives us the opportunity to create who we are becoming.

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind.

If I have a better idea, I say, 'Can we try one like this?' I try not to step on writers' toes, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it ends up in the movie, and sometimes it's the line that everyone remembers and quotes from the movie.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

The media cause more problems than they do good.

I'd like to be taller. I'd like my baby fat to leave.

I don't believe in men who make us feel unhappy, because they're boys, not men.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.