After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector.

I met The Beatles and Stones at the same time, because Michael Cooper was doing several of their album covers.

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

I'm not interested in attacking, I'm interested in astonishing.

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.

There is no power on earth that can loosen a man's grip on his own throat

In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.

When I finally made it to the set, I spent a lot of time doing damage control on The Magic Christian.

Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values.

Somewhere inside you, I hope you know who you are. I hope you know what you are. I hope you know that you're powerful. We need you.

It's not the glitter, but the love, that makes things beautiful.

What other goal could there be, then finding one's self within God and God within one's very Self? For as we know God, we also are known.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating sandwiches.

Luckily, I'm in the position now of being able to play purely because I have the desire to do so.

As much preparation as I had made for the old man Salieri, gestures and so on, the fact is after sitting for hours, your movements are kind of slow.

What makes us happy is to have a spiritual experience ... that experience of ecstasy in the deepest meditation; that's happiness.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blesses facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

My family really does come first. It always did and always will.

The great thing about history is that it is adaptable.