It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing, a wish-fulfillment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously.

You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.

Sex is the invention of a very clever venereal disease.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe. I'm rather sure of that.

All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true.

I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.