Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.

Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.

I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.

The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don't know anything about it, you enter a world that's new to you, and that's the magic of being transported.

I even think the commercial element of new American directors is really fertile right now. There are a lot of filmmakers with very particular visions, like Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson and P.T. Anderson and Alexander Payne and Peter Sollett and Harmony Korine and Vincent Gallo. At least they're making films that they choose to make, and they're on their own. That's positive to me. This is not a dead period for American cinema at all.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.