By wrecking something, it's always reinventing. All modern movements in art and music wrecked what came before, in a way - and surprised the cooler generation that was one step ahead. That's how you get ahead.

When I was young, there were bars called the 'Hungry Hole,' and in those same neighbourhoods are now gay people pushing baby carriages.

I used to hitchhike a lot. I'd come home on the train from New York, and there'd be no cabs, but people would pick me right up and take me to my door because they recognised me. It was like a car service. I never really had a bad experience hitchhiking.

I do take a one-week vacation every year, and I go to London in the fall.

I don't like reality TV. I don't want to look down on people.

Fellini was a little lofty for a teenage boy, but certainly he was a huge influence.

I'm sick of '60s nostalgia. I've been to clubs in New York where it's just like the Fillmore East. And I thought I hated that then.

I read, every day, the 'Wall Street Journal''s editorials because I like to think how my smart enemy thinks.

I can make a movie for $5M, which used to be a routinely low, independent movie, but there's no such thing as that any more.

I have so many other things going on that if 'A Dirty Shame' is my last movie, that's OK.

I've been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I've had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I've had three or four art books; it's just another way I have to tell stories.

At my age, you can go either fat or gaunt. I've gone gaunt.

I think I'm probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said 'No,' and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.

There are schools for weird children now. There wasn't when I was young.

I grew up in Baltimore, which is, you know, a city of extremes certainly, but my parents were very conservative. But they made me feel safe, and even though they were mortified at what I was doing, they encouraged it. I think because they thought, what else could I do?

I don't believe that we should never not talk to people we don't agree with politically. If you can make that person laugh, it's the first step to getting him to listen to change their mind.

Good actors, actually, in real life, are shy and very quiet people a lot of the time.

I never got along in school, really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.

The nightlife in Baltimore is very mixed. Any gay people I know go to the hipster bars; they don't go to the gay bars. Start your night at the Club Charles, and then you can meet people to go other places. The Charles has been Baltimore's favourite cool hipster bar forever.

I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.

I always wanted them to look like Hollywood movies; I just didn't know how to do it.

I remember when I first went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I bought this little Moreau print in the gift shop. I took it home, and I was, like, 12 years old or something.

Isn't that the most perverse thing you've ever heard?

My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.