Everyone goes through a weirdness as a young person, especially in college, when you're trying to figure things out.

Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there's discomfort, but there's also this sense of, 'Well, we'll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it'll be interesting.'

I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something.

Embrace your weirdness!

The thing that attracted me to 'CSI' is that these guys are always professional, but underneath, it's teeming with a heavy shadow. Maybe even some decadence and some weirdness with certain characters! And that always intrigued me as an actor.

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.

I like what I see now in China, but I think the Japanese are a step ahead into craziness and weirdness. I go to galleries there that are the size of a New York elevator, and every time I'm surprised by the amazing things I find. I really hope I'll be able to promote some of these artists, to show their work in the West.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

The thing about comedy is it gives you a platform to expose your own shortcomings, so it becomes a public display of weirdness.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

Baltimore breeds a really specific type of weirdo. Animal Collective is from Baltimore. Dan Deacon, John Waters. There's a through line of weirdness and a hard edge that I see when I meet people from that area.

I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way - the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.

In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with.

'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

Just being out in the world, you see so many things, and every day, you experience so many concepts and different people and their coolness and weirdness. It's a feast of ideas.

My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.