Top 25 Paul Morrissey Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Democrats tax anything that moves.

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

Nico was peculiar. She was extraordinary.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.