"Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life like a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that." —Spike Lee [HR via Reuters]

"We got a call right before we came back to the States, saying, 'You're not going to believe this, but you're playing the "American Idol" finale,' and I was like, 'Really? Why?'" —OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder doesn't really know what he was doing at the American Idol finale either [MTV]

"British Vogue just asked me to write about writing as a woman, and I wrote back and said, 'I don't know what to tell you.' I don't think women are mysterious — they make a lot more sense than men do." —Andrew Sean Greer on his new novel, The Story of a Marriage [A.V. Club]

"There's a level of insanity to all of this. We're marching to hell in a handbasket, and they're saying, 'Well, read this book.' Really? A book written by people in the desert under extreme conditions of heat and lack of water?" —Lewis Black on Bible thumpers [A.V. Club]

"I painted him the way he looks. In fact, I kind of like the lines in his face. I looked at thousands of pictures of him, as I do with all movies. And you know, some pictures, he didn't look good, but others, he looked fantastic. So I didn't try to young him up at all." —Drew Struzan, poster artist for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, on painting Harrison Ford [LAT]