Listen, you ignorant hillbillies, Lynyrd Skynyrd's dead. They're dead, they're dead, they're dead. The South's not risin' again. The slaves have been emancipated.

I'm kind of a dummy. I make movies and not realize until afterwards, 'Oh, I'm the protagonist.'

I like genre films.

I like movies that don't fit in a category. Like, 'Get Out' - that was one of my favorite movies in a long time, and what is that?

I really like 'Disaster Artist.'

I started doing comedy when I was a teenager with Tom Kenny, who is the voice of SpongeBob. I don't want to name drop, but, I've known him since I was 6.

My heroes, growing up, were people like Andy Kaufman and Groucho Marx and people that very rarely drop the persona.

I didn't feel ever that people needed to know who I was.

I'm not into comedies that are joke-driven.

The movies I make don't take place in reality.

I like to go to the movies and watch characters who make me question how I see the world.

I'm making movies about people as flawed as myself and the viewers. So if you just have a reptilian brain and live your life simply by reacting to things, my movies aren't going to work for you.

I've always been battling this perception people have of me, this character. It follows me around. 'Bubba the Bear' shows up when I'm checking into a hotel, when I'm on a plane. I can't get upset with people if they're only aware of a small part of my body of work. But inside I do.

I started out making fun of comedy. Then I became the thing I was making fun of.

Success is for creeps.

I have an aversion to comedy where everybody speaks in punchlines.

I think I hang out with some pretty witty people, but we're never that funny.

I actually really like being in the woods.

I started doing stand-up when I was 15 and doing Letterman when I was 20. So I've been doing stand-up comedy and clubs for over 30 years. That's a long time.

I do think there are more people who would probably related to my movies and who aren't aware of them.

My movies are always about the kooks and the outsiders.

I'm fully aware of people's perception of me, so when I start taking myself too seriously, I have to remember that, to them, I'm just the guy from 'Police Academy.'

I actually believe that the basis of a good relationship isn't liking the same things, it's hating the same things.

I'm always dealing with this sadness. I don't want to be Morrissey or anything, but it is a thing I deal with it. Every day, when I wake up, I have to make a decision to fight this depression. That sounds horrible but I'm fine with it; it's who I am; it's my life. I try not to let it cripple me.

I continue to do standup because there's a connection with a live audience - there are skills that you do learn as a standup comedian that help you on a set.

Whenever people hear that Kurt Cobain was a fan of my standup, it's like hearing Jimi Hendrix loved Buddy Hackett or something.

I don't find movies shocking.

I choose not to be in front of the camera. Sometimes I do get offered parts, but I really like just making movies and telling stories.

I was in punk bands when I was a kid, and then I would do stand-up in between bands - which wasn't any different from my singing.

I'm always amazed that people are interested in comedy.

I never was obsessed with comedians. When I was a little, little boy, I'd watch, like, George Carlin on 'Dinah Shore.'

Michael Moore got booed at the Oscars, so how liberal is Hollywood? Honestly, it's not liberal enough for me!

Obviously I don't hate America. I do believe that we are becoming - and I can only judge it by my lifetime, 'cause I don't know what it was like in the 1800s - but it just seems that as a nation, we are becoming really, really nasty, and not concerned with any kind of truth.

I don't read or watch anything that has to do with Lindsay Lohan.

In the rock n' roll world, I'm someone who's responsible and levelheaded.

I'm the Emily Dickinson of screenplays.

It's really hard to watch Leno. I set his chair on fire.

I do live a very Hugh Beaumont existence. I'm up every morning, taking my kids to school and all that, which obviously does interest me. But then it's taking meetings with goofballs and auditioning for crap, and then I spend a lot of time on the road.

I was really big in the '80s.

I was in Ann Arbor, and I was told that this singer-songwriter guy wanted to meet me. It was Kurt Cobain. Nirvana had just made 'Bleach.' Kurt interviewed me on a college radio station. It was very strange. He was a fan of mine, and he gave me his album.

When I first started directing, I could have chosen a more lucrative path, with sitcoms and things like that. But I knew enough after the experiences I had in front of the camera that I was not going to do that, because I was just going to work on my own things or work with people I respected.

In genre movies, you usually not only hate the characters, you sometimes hate them so much that you hate the actors playing them.

I'm really not a fan of letting the audience live vicariously through stuff.

I'm a weird mixture of being cynical but at the same time wanting to live in a world where Bigfoot lives.

I'm a redneck.

I was in this hamster wheel of being famous for being famous, much like a reality star. You would put me on a talkshow, I would say outrageous things. I was just perpetuating myself as a celebrity, and I found that really empty.

At the same time most people were getting out of college, I was offered a buttload of cash to star in a movie. I don't think most students would have said no.

The thing that interested me, there are so many filmmakers I admire - like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino - they have these themes where there's not much going on, but they were suspenseful.

'The Blair Witch Project' is a great movie.

I think, the first movie I saw that made me go, 'How did they do that?' was 'Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.'