I hope they get something of interest out of it, but I'd rather they all hate it and I like it, instead of vice versa... I make films to please myself first, and if the audience likes them, all the better.

That would be getting up at 5 am... I don't understand why film's shoot such brutal hours. I think it'd be worth it to not be so strictly cost-effective and have an 8 hour day. The film's would benefit in the end.

Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.

So I told Robert from the start that if we couldn't get Charles and Max to take part, but especially Charles, that I didn't want to make the film. So would he call his mother and talk to Charles and see if Charles would at all be interested.

I think the other misconceptions when the film came out, he was very upset that it was so widely released and so widely seen. And neither one of us - well, I think I had hopes it would be, 'cause I really did think it was something special.

Luckily, he was in the process of moving to France at the time, anyway. But if he had stayed in the States, I don't know how he would have handled that, because it was getting pretty crazy. I mean, a celebrity which he really did not welcome. And I can't blame him.

Whereas my producer literally worked on this thing for 10 years and because I gave that presenter credit to David Lynch, she to this day never gets credit. It really kills me.

I hope they get something of interest out of it, but I'd rather they all hate it and I like it, instead of vice versa... I make films to please myself first, and if the audience likes them, all the better.

It makes it difficult to decide which to go see, since no film about say, some tragic genocide in Africa is going to get a bad review even if it's poorly made.

Well, that was certainly - to me, until we could film in Charles' room, I didn't even want to bother filming anything else. And in fact, I did hold off and that was the first thing we filmed.

I was inspired to do anything I could to get out of what I was doing... today, I'm motivated to pay the bills.

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

A lot of things I have turned down ended up being a big embarrassment. Like that script, 'The Beaver.' I thought that was one of the worst scripts I had ever read. But everyone said, 'Ooh it's on the Black List.' Yeah, well, good for it. They're a bunch of idiots. I saw the final film, and there were no surprises.

Chicago always hit me as such a gloomy place - I just remember all the snow getting dirty as soon as it would fall, all the decaying brown brick buildings around where we lived, all this soot all over the place.

For a long time, there was this rumor that I turned down doing 'Austin Powers,' which is not true. While they did send me the script, I don't think I was ever a serious consideration to direct it. I'm sure they probably sent it to 20 others as well.

I collect old Coon Chicken Inn memorabilia. I collect black memorabilia, like old minstrel posters. It was a real place. There was one in Seattle, one in Portland, and one in Salt Lake City. They started in 1925, and then they went out of business around 1958.

I gotta tell you, I don't have many close friends, and if I do wind up making friends with somebody, it takes me a long time, usually.

I try to make a film that's very entertaining, very funny, but also gives you something to think about. And the strongest thing I have to offer is my point of view, to get across how I see the world in hopes that it can change the way other people see the world, hopefully for the better.

I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them.

Maybe if I found something I was really passionate about, which is entirely possible, I would make another documentary, but it's not a good career choice for anybody. I don't recommend it.

My hat's off to documentary filmmakers. I don't know if I'm ever going back to it. You're treated like a second-class citizen at most film festivals. You take the bus while everybody else is flown first-class. If you're a feature film director, you're put in a five-star hotel, and if you're a documentary director, you stay in a Motel 6.

People like light and silly, and they like stuff that's really energetic, and you get a character in a film bouncing around and screaming, people laugh. That's all it takes. I don't find that funny. To me, what's funny is dialogue and nuance of character and performance.

People think I have an interest in comics, but I'm only interested in comics from the '40s, like 'Donald Duck' comics.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

The last Christmas movie I really liked was 'It's a Wonderful Life,' probably. It's sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it's not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.

The main trouble with Hollywood is that the guys you have to pitch to, the guys who run the studios, are all business school grads.

The things I want to make into a film, they're personal, esoteric things, and I don't expect anyone else to like them as much as I do. I generally like my films more than anybody else will.

When I went around promoting 'Crumb,' there would be days I'd wake up in, like, Houston or Cleveland, and I'd step outside the hotel and get no idea where I was. It all looks the same: one big corporate, consumer theme park. It's all, 'Here's the Starbucks, and here's the Gap, and we'll go over to Banana Republic and the Cineplex.'

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.