People make films for different reasons. For money. Or, they make them because something in them demands artistic expression. I do it because I enjoy the work.

Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

[An audience conditioned by a lifetime of television-watching is so corrupted that] their standards have been systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out!

I've always liked, someday the lamb will lay by the lion.... but it won't get much sleep.

Have you ever taken a serious political stand on anything? Yeah. Sure. For twenty-four hours once I refused to eat grapes.

All my life is passing in front of my eyes. The worst part of it is I'm driving a used car.

It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don't touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them - it strengthens them to get through the day.