Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I'm just starting to imagine.

Everything is not laden with potential for drama in life.

When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.

Separate two particles, place them at opposite ends of the universe, produce some effect in one, and the other will be identically affected.

I hate those live action versions of animated cartoons. It ruins everything, the whole point of cartoons is to get away from photographs. I mean it would be stupid to say that cartoons are better than photographs but its true.

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

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.