Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they're taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it's normal to kneel down to a naked man who's nailed to a cross? It's like a bad leather bar.

What happened is that in the middle of my life I went away and in my own sense of hubris, pride, cynicism, thought, I am an autonomous being in the world, I can control things, I am God.' But my experiment at being God failed! And they do have a great saying in AA: 'Get down off the cross, we need the wood!' And the important thing is to realise you are not the centre of the universe, you are not God.

I'd rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,' Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.

Stupid is never that entertaining. You can be stupid and sexy, stupid and funny but he's just plain stupid. That is not remarkable, that's what I mean.

I've always believed in the goodness of people. I teach in prison. They all said, don't do it. Carry a gun, take Mace. Are you kidding? I guess, they're around so many criminal elements that they fear for.

Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall.