I have a real respect for tobacco as a substance, and it just seems very funny how the Western attitude is, "Wow, people are addicted to this, think of all the money you can make off it."

I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues.

Now in the States if you look at the TV, you see the advertisements, the TV programmes, the pop videos, and the movies, they're all the same style. I think it's very condescending to the audience to assume they only have a three second attention span and so they don't leave anything on the screen for any longer. I don't understand that.

It's a sad and beautiful world.

[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

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.

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.