I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.

I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

I'm starting to frighten myself, because I'm backsliding into my devil-may-care attitude. I'm sure it's going to catch up with me.

I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

I literally designed and built the sets myself, and I kind of liked it. I always gave myself eight weeks to do that - sometimes even 10 - and the shooting took five or six weeks.

I've been so lazy all my life. I used to literally lie on the couch, up until the age of 35, fearing that my bones were dissolving like sugar cubes, from disuse.

Those are my goals, you know. To be smart, tasteless, and feeling. Something to shoot for.

If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.

Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.

In many relationships that I've had people just try to own the other person.

You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.

The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.

Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.

There is no such thing as loving or believing too much.

Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up.

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.

The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.