On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.

I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.

I still dislike phones, yeah!

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

I don't like being in houses alone.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.

I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.

What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere.

I wish I could do everything in 3D.

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.

If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.

I'm an older generation.

You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.

You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.

I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.

Being sober and clear-eyed changes everything.

I believe in the future of country music, but a future without roots is like a kite with no string.

Well, I've always said that country music has always shared a very unique relationship with gospel music - the hooting and hollering, you know, always in abundance.

One thing that I love about country music, probably more so than any other culture - maybe the blues rivals it - there are so many American folk heroes. There's the Coal Miner's Daughter, the Man in Black, the Red-Headed Stranger, and on and on.

There was a junk store in Nashville on 8th Avenue, where I bought Patsy Cline's train case for $75.

I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.

The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.

If I go into the Mississippi Delta at pitch black midnight and put on a Robert Johnson record, it's hard to sit in the car because it's pretty powerful.

The four things a hillbilly singer needs are a Cadillac, a Nudie suit, the right hairdo, and a pair of pointy-toed boots.

I started out in gospel music. A lot of people don't know that I started out in gospel music, and I've never lost sight of it.

I don't have many regrets in my life. But I have one. I would have stayed sober all along.

Every time I hear a Garth Brooks record I tend to want to hear James Taylor.

When I started making some paychecks, I didn't invest in stocks and bonds - I invested in American culture.

Walking into the Ryman with Lester Flatt was the equivalent of walking into the Vatican with the pope.

As big as the industry is now and as gargantuan and stretched out with as many buses and trucks as there are now, it is still a big old dysfunctional family in my mind.

Going back to the Byrds and 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo,' when country was kind of getting away from the fiddle and steel aspect, it took some rock & rollers to introduce a new generation to it, and it kinda put some things straight.

The history of country music is as important as any other art form.

The only two jobs I ever had were with Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash.

From the first time I played with Lester Flatt, I sensed an extreme amount of history around me.

Unconditional love goes a long way.

In the middle of Mississippi, so many kinds of music came, but it was Nashville and country music that pulled my heart.

Sun Studios was where so much of American music exploded from.

If you look back into the Superlatives' body of work, we've always included instrumentals.

Addiction is a crazy disease. It's a progressive disease when it's not dealt with; it don't care who it takes, and it takes it all. You wind up losing your house, your home, your reputation.

I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it's pure.

I wish I could have been in the control room at Capitol Studio A listening to the playback of 'Wichita Lineman' the first time it came into the atmosphere. It must have been a perfect moment in time.

My local radio station, WHOC, Philadelphia, Mississippi - '1490 on your radio dial, a thousand watts of pure pleasure' - it was a beautiful station. And I loved everything I heard. But it was country music that touched my heart.