"I was in Kansas for about a month, and we worked most of the time in a very small town, so it felt like the production basically took the whole town over. In a way, we were the Martians in Kansas."

"One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school."

"This was basically the first time I got to act in action scenes, with things blowing up all around me. It sounds corny, but I think every actor would like to - at least once in his or her career - play the person who saves the entire world."

"Material Girls was so different for me, I'd never done a teen movie."

"It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it."

"What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O'Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote 'Jagged Little Pill.'"

"Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art."

"If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that."