When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture. - Pauline Kael

Nobody really controls a production, now; the director is on his own, even if he's insecure, careless, or nuts.

The first prerogative of any artist, in any medium, is to make a fool of himself.

A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and that it was an act of sanitation to burn it rather than sending it out into the world which was already clogged with too many copies of it. But she said, "You shouldn’t burn books" and began to cry.