Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.

When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.

I always believe you can't kill good movies, because somebody's in some room and will die unless it gets made.

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.

A lot of things just aren't true any more.

I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.