People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."

People are always afraid of the truth.

I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

When I did Sean Penn’s movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I’d come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn’t until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.