I would always be tempted to take a movie I liked less if the payday was twice as much, and I’ve interviewed a couple people that grew up with wealth and I’ve watched them navigate their career and I’ve been envious of it. Nick Kroll comes to mind. He has so much creative integrity. He just does what fascinates him.

Recently I had the privilege of joining ex German Chancellor, Angela Merkel on a panel. I have long been in awe of her leadership, not least for her endurance. She was in power for 16 years. I once asked her how she managed it, her response was "things have changed a lot."

I would say you shouldn’t waste your energy on jealousy. Ever, ever! But especially on people like me.

I think I’ve always been jealous of musicians. You hear the story where Bob Dylan wrote a song in the afternoon and it became the anthem for a generation.

Many creative people, especially the young, may feel their chaotic or disordered relationship with the world is indispensable to their creative freedom. The more anarchic, the better! However, after considerable fieldwork in this area, I have yet to find it so. I have come to understand that the muscle of the imagination is strengthened through resistance, discipline and order.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.