The only way I've learned to change anyone's mind politically is to make them laugh. My whole career has been about that.

I respect everything I make fun of.

I care about the presidential elections. I always vote. Sometimes I've voted more than once, illegally. But you can't anymore. The picture ID has ruined everything.

I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.

I actually think that my films are intellectual. I think almost everything I do is intellectual, but I would never say that, because that's a compliment. That's up to others to say about me. The same way, I would never say I do art. I think art is up to history. It's up to other people to utter that word. So I try to be humble.

"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.

I couch-surfed for years. But I always wanted to live in Baltimore; I still do. If I had to choose, it would always be Baltimore.