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

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.

There are going to be a lot of problems with social cohesion. We are already cutting down everything to the bone. Unless there is light at the end of the tunnel.

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.

None get to God but through trouble.

I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they'd never get out of them.

I think everybody's book is about somebody's daughter, in a lot of ways. I dig that.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term 'violence against women,' nobody is doing it to them. It just happens to them. Men aren't even a part of it.

God doesn't owe us an explanation for everything and actually what I've found is that explanations don't comfort. What comforts is the presence of God, not the explanation of God.

No man is charming all of the time. Even Cary Grant is on record saying he wished he could be Cary Grant.

Other actors are not my concern, and that's their life and that's their journey. Everybody has to get to a point in their own time and their own way.