People still come to Baltimore and say, "I didn't realize you made documentaries."

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.

I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

Life is a rotten lottery.

I built my [early] career on negative reviews. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square. They hated my movies. You could never have that happen today. Critics are way too hip.

Valentine's Day is my mother's birthday. If I'm wildly in love, I've sent people chicken hearts, which seems to appeal to the kind of person that I've been in love with.