“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.”

My job is going to be to direct the film – I’m going to do it. And that’s where my job ends.

The world is constantly changing. You’re constantly learning and you have to be willing to get off your mark

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

No one can stop me from talking about my movie.

It’s funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it’s fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

Even if you’re a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you’re still in the world

My grandfather lived to be 96 years old. He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy.

My existence is about making movies, so I’ve just got to rock and roll with the punches.

But I’m never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is.

My life is proof that I don’t need you to do what I do. If there’s no one to see it, I’ll watch it.

Making money is not gonna change anything about what I am, except I won’t answer the door.

The more you get into any religion, it becomes the same. It really becomes how you treat other people and how you get outside yourself.

Certain actors wanna get paid, they think working in a low-budget movie is being ripped off. But for others it’s like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’

Mulberry Street was the beating heart of the Italian-American experience, but you don’t find those gangsters now. I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

I don’t care if I get $50 million to do a film.

He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.

It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.

My life is about building and working and wrenching on some cars.