I was a smart kid and I was not understood by my parents.

My mother never had time for me. When you're the middle child in a family of five million, you don't get any attention.

God, you Jews are truly exotic." Exotic? She should only know the Greenblatts. Or Mr. and Mrs. Milton Sharpstein, my father's friends. Or for that matter, my cousin Tovah. Exotic? I mean, they're nice, but hardly exotic with their endless bickering over the best way to combat indigestion or how far back to sit from the television set.

I've gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today.

After 60, all of us belong to the weaker sex.

I do the movies just for myself like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves. Busy fingers are happy fingers. I don't care about the films. I don't care if they're flushed down the toilet after I die.

Cynicism is reality with an alternate spelling.