I've never been a big fan of the music-video style of editing movies that crept in the last few decades. I like stuff that's able to take its time.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects.

If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

The amazing thing about any movie is not whether it's good, but that it got made at all.

I just tell you what a pleasure it is to get back to the kind of filmmaking I used to be allowed to do.

I'm just another stupid human.

Looking at her always reminded me of a rose that was dripping blood. I always felt it was drawing all the life from inside. Just to look beautiful on the outside.

Ideas can't die, not because they are conceived by humans, but because time begets them.

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

As with mosquitoes, horseflies, and most bloodsucking parasites, Kenneth Starr was spawned in stagnant water.

It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it.

It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

Nothing is staged. And nothing is already there. Everything is transformed through the camera.

There was an art to the male posterior. That's all there was to it.