Vincent van Gogh was sane when he painted that piece of art, because when you you feel the mania and depression, you have all the heaven and hell your heart has ever experienced that you can tap into, to be able to create something that can last several lifetimes.

If you can imagine missing feeling sad, it's the only thing worse than pain.

Fellini was [David] Lynch's master and his biggest idol, and he believed in Fellini's view that film is a dream, it's not reality. It's all about delving into the unconscious.

Love is the most universal experience. There is nothing more important than love, there is nothing more meaningful than love, and there is nothing more human in people's relationships than love.

If I were to peruse a survey of label options, as they exist now, they either sound like a time bomb disorder or manic depression or Bipolar divide or mental illness. How can I find an identity in that? It certainly isn't something I can bring up in conversation, without a reaction of judgement or even fear.

I feel much more emotion than I did before, and more meaningful emotion and richer emotion than when I was manic. I'm able to experience meaningful things that can only be experienced when I'm stable, like a family.

After working with so many great actors and acting students in film school, it was a whole other thing working with Luke [Kirby].

Imagine having love for someone and being told, You're not allowed to experience that love because you're not allowed to experience pain. It's a dilemma that so many people with bipolar can't reconcile. They can't find a way out of it. The truth is that you can have both.

Emotions are what drives everyone. You get up in the morning and go do something because the emotion drives you to it.

When you encounter that first love, a young love, you do feel that your story is original. You are utterly convinced that your story has never been told before, because it hasn't.

If they could say that to their patients, it could be a way to treatment, as in both working on it and preserving it. That could give a patient the faith to fully experience that beauty, without reliving the torment.

David Lynch was actually the one who first inspired me to become a filmmaker when I was in high school. His films just took me to that dream place that lifts you out of the norm, out of the everyday life, and that is kind of what allured me.

If people are saying that somehow their connection is going to be detrimental to their health, of course they are going to reject that idea, because that's the power of falling like that.