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.

I'm not an analytical person, so it's not my job to even know what the hell the thing meant. It's not my problem. I'm just supposed to do it. Sometimes, people have explained things to me that I might have been semi-conscious of or not.

My first film I made, "Permanent Vacation," we shot in 1979 for like $12,000, part of which I got a fake car loan for that Amos Poe told me you could do that. And, yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. It was just like, well, we're going to try and do this. Partly because I had been following Amos Poe and Eric Mitchell around for about a year, and I worked on some of Eric's films as a sound recordist and stuff.

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.

No mistakes can be make during rehearsals, only progress toward what works best.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

I think we need to sort of broaden our definition of poetry, which maybe it's a good thing that they just gave this Nobel Prize to [Bob] Dylan because blurring the lines of song lyrics and also hip-hop for me is like some of the greatest uses - most innovative uses of language in my lifetime.