Quotes

I don't care if I get $50m to do a film.

My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.

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.

Where I come from you're not raised to think on your own. It's not that you're pushed to read the Bible. The Bible is read to you.

I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

No one can stop me from talking about my movie.

I come from a world where you get the film done, that's a success.

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.

I'm about my characters.

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.'

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

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

The secret is not to make a film that causes something like Virginia Tech to happen. The secret is to make a film that stops it happening.

As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.

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.

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

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

There's no such thing as a non-final cut director.

Growing up in Poland, I didn't have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don't have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.

I always try not to overload my music with orchestration and to use only those instruments that are absolutely necessary.

I wrote my first piano piece when I was in 4th grade.

I don't like the word 'experiment' in the context of art in general. It implies something immature, unfinished, something entertaining for a moment before it becomes irrelevant.

My music lives because of real players.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.