Film Directors From New York City

""I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”"

"Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying."

"Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just "relax on me.""

"Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds."

"I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?"

"Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn't resist"

"Her stickly, muscly little body thrashes beside me every night .. even as I slipped my hand into my underwear .. I always pretended to hate it."

"One would think that making a film is an ; you're building this—it's not, it's . The best metaphor I know of is we make in [] and it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's what the process is."

"Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined."

"I think this is the greatest threat to our republic ever. Not the Depression, not World War II, not the Civil War. This is it … This moment of all these intersecting viruses, of novel coronaviruses and of racial injustice — [a] 402-year-old-virus. And it’s an age-old human virus of lying and misinformation and paranoia and conspiracy. This is the pill that will kill us unless we do something."

"I don’t like anything that makes fun of Asian culture or makes it look dumb. It’s such a thin line to walk and everyone draws that line someplace different. It’s such a subjective thing."

"Whenever I quit porn, I'll be starting at square one again—I am going to be where all my friends were ten years ago. I don't know if I want to have kids, so that is a huge issue right now in my mind, too..."

"Symbolize and summarize."

"There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I'm a working man. Perhaps I'm luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good."

"Design is thinking made visible."

"My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it."

"It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group."

"We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again. Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you’re going to replace actors." You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they’ll have to wear a lycra leotard!"

"When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that."

"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. … That movie was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns did to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."

"I’ve always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane. … The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge."

"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

"The experience I had seeing Star Wars for the first time was mind-blowing. Eleven is a great age to have your mind blown. I will never forget that feeling of seeing "Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" fade out. It was the first time a movie made me believe in another world that way."

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

"Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men."

"Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."

"Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease."

"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work."

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.""

"The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal."

"I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70."

"Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist."

"Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four."

"With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie."

"In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides [to both sexes]. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that's what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she's so funny."

"I like how if you criticize the war you don't support the troops. You're the ones sending them over to die, so how is it I don’t support them? If the army was made up of child molesters, then I'd support them. If we went to an all child molester army, I would be their biggest supporter. "Please don't bring the troops home. Stay the course. Keep them there a long time." But they're not child molesters. And they're not the Twins, that’s for sure. Where are the Twins? Send in the Twins. I'd like to hear that scene. "Jenna, Barbara... Daddy and I have talked it over and we want you to go fight in Iraq." …Ah, what's the use?"

"Let me tell you something; I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish. (When accused of being a self-loathing Jew; Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2, Episode 3, "Trick or Treat")"

"(on not going to his high school prom) I wasn't aware of the prom. I had no idea that it was even going on, not that I would have gone. It's not the kind of thing that would ever occur to me. You would think I would have heard about it in school, but I didn't. (Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book)"

"Pretty...pretty...pretty......pretty.....pretty good. (Curb Your Enthusiasm, passim)"

"This is a sad day for the Emmy's. It is, however, a good day for Larry David. I imagine the wife will be forthcoming tonight. (Accepting an Emmy Award)"

"(Asked if he believes in miracles) I believe that every erection is a miracle. (Curb Season 7, Episode 6 "The Bare Midriff")."

"I tolerate lactose like I tolerate people."

"I have to let him know that he's potentially destroying his movie, that he could be making a terrible, terrible error. I needed to let him know that I didn't know or think that I was capable of doing this."

"I've had some experience in this arena. So it wasn't foreign to me to have a woman say she doesn't want to see me anymore."

"Listen, this is crazy. I look like I'm 75 years old. Nobody wants to watch an old man being funny. That's just a fact. No one wants to see this old man on TV."

"A lot of sexual harassment stuff in the news, and I couldn't help but notice a very disturbing pattern emerging, which is that many of the predators, not all, but many of them are Jews"

"I even found myself doing a routine on Saturday Night Live with my impersonator Larry David, who did Bernie Sanders better than I did."

"One thing about Hitler that I admire is that he wouldn't take any shit from magicians." (Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO special)"

"If every student was like me in college, we'd still be in Vietnam."