• I’m like, I like this world. What you mean is free meaning you could do whatever you want. You could always do whatever you wanted; you have the ability to do that. You just have to gather your resources. You already show it on a regular basis.

• Nobody could see your butt if you're making love to them.

• Your ass is the Wizard of Oz, and your dick is what they all see.

• You're smart, but more importantly, you're clever. Clever goes a lot further than smart in this world.

• I don’t mean to just say you sound smart; you represent a level of understanding that I admire. When you said, "I don't know nothing," I thought, that's not true. I couldn't have done what you did. This isn't me kissing ass or licking knob; I didn’t watch the whole interview, but for the few minutes I did, I thought, this guy's really smart.

• I learned that good enough can take you very far. In fact, good enough has taken me 30 years. On the set of Clerks, when we were shooting, I would often say, "Cut, um, all right, that's good enough, let's move on, let's do something else." Good enough has gotten me here, to this chair, and I believe it will get you as far as you need to go.

• Good enough gets me to the set. If I've rehearsed enough before we shoot, I can usually get it in one or two takes, and then I say, "Good enough, moving on." All that time adds up, and that's money saved. I suppose at some point in your career, you might strive for perfection, but honestly, I never have, and I've been doing this for 30 years. Some people, especially in the Letterboxd crowd, might be disgusted by that thought, thinking, "Oh, he doesn't even try." But I do try; I've been doing this for 30 years. I show up, I deliver, and I just don't make everyone's life miserable in the process.

• I have a vision and an idea of where we're going, and I want everyone to have a good time doing it. Otherwise, what’s the point? If people on set are miserable while making pretend for a living, then everyone has failed, and this job shouldn't be like that. It should be fun; after all, we are making pretend for a living. I understand that some people believe "art is pain," but I don't subscribe to that notion. While filmmaking is indeed an art form, it doesn't have to be painful. It can be very cathartic, and many folks can't pivot from that mindset.

• I am the guy who says, "That's good enough, let's move on." Every one of my movies is good enough; they don't have to be great. I saw someone on Twitter recently say that a film has "one or two really brilliant ideas" and the rest is just some "horeshit." I thought, "Yeah, that's it." You don't have to keep watching if you don't like that kind of thing. But I'm lucky; I manage to have one or two good ideas amidst the "horeshit," especially after 30 years in the industry.

• if you're always aiming for perfection, you might find that many people don't even go that far. The fear of not being prepared for perfection often prevents them from taking that first step.

• If we can't live in the past—or shouldn't live in the past because it's unhealthy—and we shouldn't live in the future due to past depression and future anxiety, there's only one place to be. We have no choice but to be here in the present.

However, so often we're not in the present. Nobody wants to be in this moment; they want to be there. Everyone's headed to a place, and then everyone's obsessing about where we've been. Kids, this is what they taught me in the nut house. I'm going to save you a lot of money and time: be here and now, be mindful, breathe. The easiest way to do that, if your head's going crazy and you're in the future worrying about some bad outcomes, or if you're in the past worrying about some old traumas, is just to breathe.

• You go, just breathe in and out five times, taking deep breaths. You know what it does? It grounds you. Do you know why? Because you cannot breathe in the past, and you cannot breathe in the future. You can only breathe in the here and now. By breathing, you bring yourself back to the moment. You pull yourself out of that fake future that you're fretting about, and you pull yourself out of that horrendous past that you're still traumatized by.

• You could sit there and think, "Well, wait, is anything wrong?" No, my body is reacting to some thoughts I was thinking about because the body stores trauma. I just did this to myself; I created this condition. You could pull yourself out of that. I'm not saying this is a cure for everything; some people go through real struggles. But when you're in your head, oh yeah, that ain't real life. You may have gone through real trauma in your life, but when you're in your head fretting about it, you are making up a fiction.

• You have to put that thought away, flip the script, and be like, "I'm in the here and now." If you can't do that and you have to be in the future, just make up a better future. It has just as much a likelihood of coming true as the fake scenarios that you're fretting about, ruining your life. At least be an author for the best for yourself. Make it up; make up good things.