The Quarantine Tapes

“On the one hand, this has felt like a moment of impossibility, of stupidity, and of being stuck--quite literally of being stuck in your own home. And at the same time, I think from that impossibility there has arisen a sense of possibility, of thinking that the world might be otherwise than the world that gave rise to and so dreadfully mismanaged a global health crisis.”

“What I’m really doing is having a look at human behavior. The way people act and talk and connect and move during the period of time in which I am making movies. The institution simply provides a convenient framework for that.”

“I do think that stories are these storehouses of who we are as human beings and what we can be. They speculate what we can be, they tell us what we have been.”

“The business felt to me, as I was getting into it, as sort of a punk rocker getting into publishing, it felt to me like upper middle class and upper class white people gazing at themselves and marveling at how clever they are; a industry trying to sell books to people with fancy liberal arts college degrees and I’m not interested in that at all. I love books and my vision of books is not selling books to well-educated people.”

“The thing I find consoling, Paul, is to make sure before I go to bed that I read one poem by somebody else...I always feel that that moment before going to bed is my last chance to make something good of my life.”

“This is a cyclical nature that we’re seeing this violence. We’ve been watching this violence for 400 years and we will still see more of it. But it’s also the fact that, regardless of how often it happens, we will not be silenced. We will not disappear. In fact, if anything, the remembering and memorialization of those incidences makes us stronger and fortifies us as a people--not just African Americans, but Americans, to seek justice.”

“Working in the ER, in particular, is this constant reminder of what I go home to and just the enormous--I feel like “privilege” is overused--but I feel so privileged to have this job and being in a position to help.”

“For kids, they might begin with that type of innocence but the more that they’re rewarded for one type of speech or the other, then you start to get warp in society. And if the parents don’t fix it, you start to lose information from generation to generation. You go backwards so fast.”

“I was concerned with not only the artist’s role in calamity, but the question of how artists should situate themselves in an oracular sense, towards the potential of forestalling future calamities and creating a more just society.”

“People ask, ‘Is it hard to be expected to be funny all the time?’ and the answer is that it’s hard to be expected to be serious all the time.”