I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

You gotta make the movie you want to make.

I'm not saying they won't be bigger projects someday.

And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning.

As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.

I didn't know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn't believe it - we must change them 10 times a day - each. So that's 20 diapers a piece a day.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

I never go overbudget on my movies.

I like to see how I can do it for less money.

I was dissatisfied just being an actor.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

Sometimes it's difficult directing yourself on film because you can't quite separate yourself from the subject.

But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.

I'm actually one who will encourage directors to cut my lines.

I was always attracted to the past as a kid.

I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.

Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.

I would rather just do the things I want to do.

I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.

So yes, I hope to act in other people's movies, big and small, because that's how I make my living, really.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.

I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid.

The majority of directors I've worked with didn't know how to talk to actors.

I make time to write.

I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

I love directing - it's always so involving, so challenging.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Doorman - a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.