Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas in the past they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy.

People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.

The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are thee roads of genius.

What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.

But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.