My mother was a barmaid and I was raised in a trailer park. I'm used to that language. I put it on the screen so that people could interpret it as they wish.

The first Decline I did was out of sheer love and appreciation for the music. In 1977, it was more about bands, because punk was a new form of music. It was groundbreaking and political.

I actually picked up copies of Decline I and II at a flea market once. I walked out without paying.

For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.

I got IRS records to finance what I wanted to do.

I like to think about society as being a flock of birds: There seems to be a common consciousness in different time periods, and the new common consciousness reacts to the old standards.

I was always into music. I think everyone is when they're a teenager, as a way to drown out the world.

I really feel kind of guilty spending 80 million dollars. People are starving in the world.

Nobody wanted to touch Decline III when they found out what it was about.

Arnold and Jamie Lee must have worked over the years with directors that did 50 takes, because I'd get like three takes or so and say, Ok, that's it, we're done.

Decline III, I funded myself, from the studio money. That, and I sold a lot of drugs. Kidding. Don't print that.

She stabbed him with her wicked pretty knife, disrupted his simple life.She's a player, a heartbreaker, and now she breaks alone.

It is not the time that a person has lived that determines maturity, but what he does during that time.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he is buying.

I get angry when people bring derisory actions against me.

Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them.

I don't get along with anything, I really don't...I'm, I'm, maybe I'm just a, you know, incredibly tasteful human being.

Most of the worst things said about me, I've said myself.

Life is like licking Honey from a Thorn

Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.

So many of us feel like we're misfits until we finally find our tribe - the other people who are are strange in the same way - and suddenly everything clicks.