When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.

My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.

Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.

I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.

I was a very violent kid. I think movies and writing and art have been a way of channeling this.