If you want to be an artist, go to every art gallery, if you want to be in movies, see movies! You have to participate in whichever world you're trying to enter! You have to know what's going on. You can be the best artist in the world but if you don't know one thing about which gallery to go to, you're never going to get it shown in the right place. Learn a little bit about the business of whichever art you're trying to get into. Without it, you will be lost.

I'll have pot in my home for guests - I'm polite! - but I don't sit around and smoke by myself, ever. Not like I did when I was young.

I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

You go to school to figure out who you want to be and how you can do it, and [maybe] I should have, because the films would probably be technically better.

If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.

When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.