The nice thing about piracy is, it allows the public to get independent art, to get a variety of music and movies.

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!

My favorite film is always the one that I most recently worked on.

Comedy is not commercial; it is risky, because what is funny in one place isn't always funny somewhere else.

I didn't even know what a film director was. To me, Charlie Chaplin was a goofy clown, and John Ford - what? Never heard of him.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.