"When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now.'"

"We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice."

"You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."

"Art depends on luck and talent."

"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."

"Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance."

"Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos."

"Anyone who's made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film."

"The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy."

"I believe that filmmaking - as, probably, is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you've got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way."

"We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene."

"Art is to look at not to criticize."

"The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?"

"There is no art without intention."

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it."

"There is no art when one does something without intention."

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it."

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."

"Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat."

"Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost."

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn."

"The art of government is the organisation of idolatry."

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress."