Top 45 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Morrissey

I've always been an independent producer. I'd kind of like to be hired help for a change. I don't mind that.

I like the idea of stepping back into another time period.

I adore jokes. They're a theatrical contrivance, but the irony of all fiction is that you approach reality by avoiding it a bit; you spoof it a bit.

Andy was not a hippie or rebel but more like a mischievous child. He was never out to destroy everything. He became a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know, like the media, what's going on around them is a fashion thing that will change to something else.

It's a debilitating process, working with the studios. With the length of time it takes for drafts and development deals, your enthusiasm is gone before you're ready to make the film.

What made Andy famous was the years I managed him. I created the Velvet Underground and told him not to worry about them because they would help his career. All those things I did created his fame.

The people of Pittsburgh should have a weekend flea market at the Warhol. Andy would have loved that kind of stuff.

Even Andy never hung his own paintings. He'd sell them or put them in a box.

It's not a secret, but if you know what the hell you're doing, you pick good actors. And you know what makes a good actor? A good personality in the performer, in the person.

It's good to aggravate people a little. It makes them pay attention.

You can't have the real thing on camera - that's the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you're seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a 'men at work' sign. It's not acting if you can see it.

Andy was a character, and the two of us did have some things in common. We appreciated funny things, didn't like serious things.

I never wanted to be anything special. I just wanted to make films.

So many things go on in life that never find their way into the movies because so much of it is unappealing. But that's what I want to show.

I love Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, but not Charlie Chaplin.

If a person is in front of a camera, they're acting. It's not possible to live in front of a camera.

I think it's absurd to believe that movies should look like paintings and say something like serious books say something.

The Democrats tax anything that moves.

I'm not against censorship in principle. Not at all. Some things should be censored.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

None of my films are comparable to anybody else's. So many years after I made them, nobody's been able to copy them.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

Every movie I've ever made says the same thing. They all find comedy in people trying to live their lives without any rules.

Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you're not going to be good.

You don't put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it's always underneath.

If I thought about planning, I'd plan movies. If I thought about planning my life, I'd plan my life more rationally, not like New Yorkers who live their lives so irrationally, without reason. Maybe that's the connection between my movies and New York: the movies have the same kind of lack of overall design.

People treat serious subjects so seriously, which is so obvious a way of dealing with them. I'm always thinking that the best way of dealing with them is to show people as human beings.

My films always play better outside of New York, especially to critics.

Nico was peculiar. She was extraordinary.

We are always getting photos and publicity from people who want to act in Andy's movies. We always throw them away. They don't seem to realize that the last thing we'd put into a movie is an actor. Because all the other movies use actors.

I've always stayed independent, but I've always felt an obligation to make movies an untutored audience could like.

I was brought up with TV comedians. I'll remember them till I go to my grave, all those comedians, as decadent fluff.

Andy was an offbeat personality, shy and insecure. The whole reason for taking a camera with him wherever he went was because he was so shy. He'd break the ice by taking pictures.

I've been the movie business for over 50 years, and I've done everything imaginable that could be done or ever was done by anybody.

Andy was not a director and not a writer. He operated the camera a little bit, and he wasn't even so good at that.

Andy always thought that films would be where we'd make money.

Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.

Andy wasn't capable of any complicated thoughts or ideas. Ideas need a verb and a noun, a subject. Andy spoke in a kind of stumbling staccato. You had to finish sentences for him. So Andy operated through people who could do things for him. He wished things into happening, things he himself couldn't do.

Most of the time, I leave the camera on the obvious special effects, like the rubber bodies, so that it become obvious they're not real.

A good conservative is someone with an open mind.

There's something about all the films that I have made in that they don't seem old or dated, and some people mention that.

My sense is that you can make a film under almost any circumstances. As long as someone has a vague idea of what he's doing, something distinctive will emerge. That, to me, is what film making is all about.

I did say to myself one day, 'I'd love to be a Jewish comedian,' but that's my only memory with any connection to show business.

Rome has New York's formlessness, aimlessness, a kind of hard-boiled sophistication, blase about everything. In their filmmaking, too, the Italians have this tongue-in-cheek sense of comedy.

I'm not anti-Hollywood; not at all. In fact, I'm rather fascinated by everything that goes on here. When I get hold of a copy of 'Variety,' I read it cover to cover; I love to know what people are doing.