I've always had an easy time directing actors because I always hire ones that are great before I get my hands on them.

Where I grew up in Brooklyn, nobody committed suicide. Everyone was too unhappy.

With me; it's just a genetic dissatisfaction with everything.

When you make the film, it's like a chef who works on the meal. After you're working all day in the kitchen and dicing and cutting and putting the sauces on, you don't want to eat it. That's how I always feel about the films. I work on it for a year. I've written it, I've worked with the actors, I've edited, put the music in. I just never want to see it again.

It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.