American Quotes

I know I have the mental capacity of a thousand bloggers, but because of that, my obligation to serve God is also that of a thousand bloggers.

I don't have any particular beef with Barbara Boxer. My beef is with the official Democratic doctrine that anybody who reaches Boxer's position has to spout and has to endorse.

Ezra Klein gets under my skin. He seems to spout the party line.

Do we really want a society in which the stigma of going on the dole has been erased?

An ignorant person with a bad character is like an unarmed robber, but a learned person with a blog is a robber fully armed.

Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

This one, even though it called for San Francisco, I think they wanted to initially shoot part of the film up here, you know get the exteriors and then go back to L.A. We really fought to get it up here and I think Paramount was really pleased.

They are always very lax about putting restrictions on violence for children's movies, which I think is much more harrowing than sexuality for children.

The truth is, I'm drawn to all kinds of things.

The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.

That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

Nowadays they either want to move the film to Canada or in some cases they go to Prague or Romania or they want to keep 'em down in L.A.

It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.

I shot a lot of close-ups on this movie 'cause there's like a dual mystery, she's searching through her haunted past to find some truth and she's also following an external mystery where she comes to think she might be the killer.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

But you know, there's always a danger nowadays that films are gonna be brought up to Canada for budget reasons. And that's something that really concerns me.

And I liked this extreme character of de Sade.

You can have a lot of unhappiness by not having money, but the reverse is no guarantee of happiness.

There is no way I could have ever dared to make a documentary, much less have the money to make a documentary, if it was on 16mm. But, with the magic of digital.

Movies are art and the spirit of the movie depends on the creators.

It is up to us to produce better-quality movies.

In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the 8 hours when we stop killing each other and gratutious over eating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

I like fat people more then I like thin people, things are always a lot more funnier when they happen to fat people.

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.