If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.

In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.

I've been too many places. I'm like the bad penny.

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

Once you've been really bad in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.