“You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.”

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

If I’ve made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I’ve accomplished something.

When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.

You can’t write poetry on the computer.

The good ideas will survive.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I’m not interested in, I can’t even feign interest.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

One thing I don’t understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they’ll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them. It’s my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.

I steal from every movie ever made.

My parents said, Oh, he’s going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

If I’m doing my job right, then I’m not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I’m just jotting it down.

It is not a sin to be seventy but it is also no joke.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera. There is never going to be a next [tabloid] installment about my life because my own stuff is my own stuff.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

Many a truth is told in jest.

Do not mock a pain you have not endured.

I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.

But I can tell you markets are like women, always commanding, always mysterious, always volatile, always exciting and it is not a joke.

I find that when I tell lawyer jokes to a mixed audience, the lawyers don’t think they’re funny and the non-lawyers don’t think they’re jokes.