Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

[on buying a private island] Money doesn't buy you happiness, but it buys you a big enough yacht to sail right up to it.

I don't think anybody's necessarily ready for death. You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you've said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence.

My recipe for success is chance, basically. Just luck. It's a miracle that people still hire me after some of the stuff I've gotten away with. Honestly!

Every filmmaker's different, every filmmaker has a different approach.

I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots.

They tell you to be careful because maybe you don't want to meet your heroes. I've met pretty much every one, and I've never been let down.