When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

The children despise their parents until the age of when they suddenly become just like them - thus preserving the system.

Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.

I was trying to do like a spaghetti western but using World War II iconography.

I wasn't a predator. I didn't pick on other people all right, but people didn't beat me up.

It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.

When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.