I would love to be an historian. I'm a bit of a history geek and love books and programmes on the subject.

I was persuaded to see 'The Muppets' by a friend, and I regretted it. A very boring hour and a half.

People assume that you need to run fast to get to optimum fitness, but the truth is endurance lifting makes you stronger and leaner.

I do weights three or four times a week, and it has had an incredible impact on my confidence.

I have a real passion for anything medieval, which is why I love the drama series 'Game Of Thrones.'

I live in a beautiful village in the middle of the countryside, and being able to disappear off on my bike for a couple of hours two or three times a week is a wonderful way to relax.

Over the years, I've had torrid luck with things going wrong.

Ultimately the clothing company is a large investment on my part, and I'm taking a huge gamble. But having a focus away from the track is good for you.

I've had 30 hamstring tears.

Lolo Jones came up to me and said, 'Well done, Greg,' and I don't think I've ever spoken to her in my life.

I've never had a car sponsor or all the things that most others seemed to have had.

I think there are lot more lows in an athletes career than the highs, but you've got to be bale to take them on the chin.

I wasn't jumping like Carl Lewis, but I still won an Olympic title.

Even before I really started, no one said I would make it. But I always had belief.

I take my three dogs for long walks every day, and I use that time to talk myself through winning every major competition.

My entire life, I've been searching for acceptance.

I was that ginger kid who always wanted people to like him. It's hard, and you've got a big chip on your shoulder for a long time.

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 nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

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

I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.

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

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.

You only get one life, so you might as well feel all the feelings.

Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.

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.

I thought movies were handed down by God. I knew that theater was made by people because I saw the people in front of me, but movies seemed like they were delivered, wholly made, from Zeus's head or something.

There's a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It's based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.

I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.

I'm always interested in relationships between women. I'm always interested in how women relate to each other, whether it's a family relationship or it's a friend relationship. That's such uncharted territory in cinema.

I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper. I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies, and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day.

I think I've always wanted to direct, but I didn't go to film school. I was lucky enough to work in movies, and I think those became my film school in terms of acting and watching directors work and also writing and co-writing and producing.

Nobody knows what you have in you until you've done it, so I just keep pushing those boundaries, and I figure it will all come out in the wash.

I'm interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

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'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.

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.

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 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, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who's about to leave it.

I think it's a great tragedy of childhood that you only really appreciate it once it's done: it's very hard to feel appreciative of the gifts you have until you're gone.

I loved dance.

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

I knew I wanted to be involved with theater or film in any way I could, either as a writer or director or actress.

Woody Allen was the reason I wanted to move to New York City and one of the reasons I wanted to make films. I felt that I understood his films, and I love them so much. When you're starting out, certainly, you have this sense of wanting to talk back to people who have influenced you, and I always wanted to talk back to Woody Allen.

In terms of sheer pleasure, Tom Stoppard was very big for me because he is so funny and so smart, and it felt delicious reading him.

When I did plays in high school and college, I never remember memorizing my lines, but once I had blocking, I had all my lines memorized. Once I had movement associated with words, it was fine. Before I had blocking, it was just text on a page. Once it became embodied, it was much easier.

I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can't. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again.

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.