In the case of The Loved One, I was hired to collaborate on an updated version of the book.

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.

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

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Many strokes though with a little axe hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak.

Hooked on Phonics worked for me.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

I thought it was funny. I always thought Star Wars and Indiana Jones were basically comedies. The humour came out of their relationships; it came out of the fact that we were basically types.

Let's move forward to try to address the most egregious and outrageous corrupting aspect of campaigns in America today and that is the incredible inundation of soft money and its pernicious effects.

You can't win everybody to the Lord, but you can always win somebody.

A few people have privately voiced fears that on coming back to office I shall go after them. These fears are groundless. There will be no paying off old scores. The past is prologue.

Sesame oil is probably my favorite condiment, period.