“I started at the top and worked my way down.”

Criticism is the essence of creation.

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

There are three intolerable things in life – cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

I’m not fixed in any genre. I love all kinds of films. The essential thing is; you have to have good material. If you have the filmmaker, and the material, and the script is good, you can start from there.

Catch the light and begin again.

I started painting the touch of your voice, and ended up writing a love song.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

If people would just wake up to what’s real, there would be no misery in the world. I guess chanting’s a pretty good place to start.

The action that I’ve started, sometime I’ll have to face. My influence in motion, rebounding back through space.

You live these three months in this reality, in this dark reality, you don’t want to do those films every year because they’re taxing. I started smoking a lot of cigarettes.

The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.