Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.

I really like dating stories, like in Betty and Veronica comics; I like David Lynch and H.P. Lovecraft for the dark gut-wrenching stuff, and I'm inspired by Miyazaki's films for the subtle heart-warming moments, as well as the moments that blew up my imagination.

For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.