Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
You don't appreciate what you have when it all comes to you real quick. I went from nothing to everything all at once.
We made this movie for $17, and nobody got anything. So it never dawned on me that we would get real people.
Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.
I was considered one of RCA's brightest young people. Then one day, I found out we'd been sold. They didn't even consult me.
It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending.
Sometimes your dreams come true, and it's a real drag.
Give something that wasn't expected.
I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
Not the first half you might have expected, even though the score might suggest that it was.
My father died the year I was elected to Congress: 1987.
The fact is, when I wrote 'Juno' - and I think this is part of its charm and appeal - I didn't know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made!
This one fellow I met at the gym. I went out to dinner with him and he said, 'I've been watching you for a year and I never thought you'd go out with me!' Then he fainted at the dinner table. I didn't know what the hell to make of that.
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
So to be standing here, this was really, truly, honestly never part of anything we even imagined in our wildest dreams.
Not everybody has their first kiss in front of 200 extras and their mom.
It's a strange thing when someone passes away. It's always when you're not expecting it that you're affected by it. When we first started filming, we were filming with existing characters in a location that we'd never been before.
Initially, it was sort of devastating to lose full animation and go limited.
The only conflict that is worse than one that is intended is one that is unintended.
The Vice President credited his father with this wisdom.
I would have been very happy just working from job to job, paying my rent one movie at a time. I never wanted to be this famous. I never imagined this life for myself.
The flop that hit me was 'Tevar.' It felt like someone knocked the wind out of me. When you do a home production, it always hurts more. I wasn't ready to accept that 'Tevar' didn't do well.
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.
The reality is my career started with a song that wasn't finished and a video I didn't know was going on the Internet. It happened so out of my control.
Above all, it's never blind chance: it's a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I've worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I'm often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.
It was just an accident; I was never going to come out here.