The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.

Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain by now. What a better world it would be if other people were doing things with Mickey Mouse!

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.

My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!

I like fat people more then I like thin people, things are always a lot more funnier when they happen to fat people.

The first time I took acid, I made the decision that I would stay in New York and find an independent film company to get a job with.