The good ideas will survive.

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery.

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.