People have said that I said I hate television. I never did say that. What I said was that I hated a lot of stuff that was on television. It's nothing about the medium itself.

There's something very dreamlike about film, and I will always be very fascinated by that, and I'm always tempted to go in that direction.

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Laurel and Hardy' with my cousins all the time. I still think they're extremely funny and so surreal.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

I was so besotted with '8½' that, when it was on TV, I used to take pictures with my 35-mm. camera of the frames of the film. That was the first time I'd ever really seen Italians on screen.

Hope comes in many forms.

The Sopranos' is filled with really retrograde humor. Bathroom humor, falls, stupid puns, bad jokes - infantile, adolescent stuff, but it makes me laugh.