Greta Gerwig

“When I was a kid, I used to do my homework in the living room, where there was a picture window. I was hoping that someone would walk by and see me looking very studious in my living room.”

“Courage doesn't grow overnight. It can be a long process.”

“There are a lot of love stories in 'Maggie's Plan,' but the deepest, truly romantic one is between Maggie and her daughter.”

“I'm not really capable of memorizing stuff without moving around, that's how I do it.”

“From Rebecca Miller, I took the idea that the director needs to arrive every day an hour ahead of everyone else and walk through the entire day.”

“For Mike Mills, I learned that having dance parties and crying with your cast does not make you a weak director, it makes you a strong director.”

“I loved 'Moonlight.' I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.”

“I wouldn't call myself 'into the DJ scene.' I have friends who are DJs, like James Murphy. I was really into the DJ scene at his wedding. But generally, I'm not at the clubs. I've never been...”

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

“There's something that happens around 27 and 28, when people start coupling off more aggressively or changing their lives according to what their economic prospects are, and not keeping them...”

“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 pathologi...”

“We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.”

“Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.”

“I wrote the script to 'Lady Bird,' and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home - like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, gro...”

“I'm, like, the only actor in New York who's never, ever been on any 'Law & Order.' And I've auditioned for so many. The sad thing is I love 'Law & Order.' I'm really obsessed with it. And th...”

“When you're writing a screenplay, it's like you're dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.”

“The transition from tiny movies to less tiny movies to really big movies has been actually quite seamless in a lot of ways as far as my experience of acting in them.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”