If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

One day, God said 'Let there be prey.' And he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder.

An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It's the Jewish malmsey.

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.

I always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.