People keep asking me, 'What evil lurks in you to play such bad characters?' There is no evil in me, I just wear tight underwear.

I think of [my photographs] as found paintings because I don't crop them, I don't manipulate them or anything. So they're like found objects to me.

The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.

I couldn't get a job acting all the time and there were down periods where I could take photographs or paint. I got into a lot of trouble when I was young, from making two films with James Dean, watching him work and then him dying and thinking I could turn down work. There was a big difference, he was a star and I wasn't. So I got in a lot of trouble and was essentially banned from Hollywood.

Art is a bad word in Hollywood. You use art too many times and they show you the elevator and then your name is taken off the parking lot.

... I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.

You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.