“As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.”

“As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.”

“Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.”

“But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.”

“Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.”

“I didn't know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn't believe it - we must change them 10 times a day - each. So that's 20 diapers a piece a day.”

“I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.”

“I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.”

“I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.”

“I make time to write.”

“I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.”

“I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid.”

“I was always attracted to the past as a kid.”

“I was dissatisfied just being an actor.”

“I would rather just do the things I want to do.”

“I write in the mornings. During my down time.”

“I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.”

“I'm a control freak. Totally.”

“I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.”

“It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning.”

“Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.”

“People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.”

“The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.”

“The majority of directors I've worked with didn't know how to talk to actors.”

“The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.”

“You gotta make the movie you want to make.”