“So what. What are you going to do? Jump off the Empire State Building?” It’s all still the same. The last day of your life is still going to be a day.”

You know, these month – or two-month-long endeavors that millions of dollars are based on.

In the film business, it’s basically honor among thieves.

I grew up in the Bronx. I’m into rap music.

I’m a lapsed Buddhist like I’m a lapsed Catholic. I take it to a point.

How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this ‘I, me, mine’ type of thing.

The actors that I love to work with, they’re hard on me. They’re pushing me.

I don’t want to live anywhere where I’m breathing two million cars’ fumes and paying a zillion dollars for the right to be totally hassled.

I direct, and I make movies I can’t finance. I can’t raise money. I can’t sell anything. I make things.

I’m not a big fan of talking about dying. And then I make a movie where I kill everybody.

I don’t need to push myself. I don’t need to sharpen my own knife and slit my throat.

I don’t have a problem with Werner Herzog.

I’m living in a real postmodern time – every single thing sings to you to tell you it’s started, it’s stopped, you’ve got a message, you didn’t get a message.

Most filmmaking is about shaking hands and just starting.

And get off your spot and take that knowledge you have not to fix yourself into a place but to keep going.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

Рow can we be, even if it is the last day on earth? It’s like Christmas Eve. “Okay, it’s going to be Christmas.

So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

I’ve had a lot of experience building things, organizing things, a national scholarship program.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it’s quite small and contained.

Big Ben just kept building up. It ended up coming off the field. It kept taking over. Superman kept taking over Clark Kent and you just never saw who Ben Roethlisberger was any more.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn’t been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

A good 80 percent of the vault is still physical and another percentage of it, 20, 25 percent is mental.

I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.