Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.

Drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.

This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.

If I won't be myself, who will?

Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.