Abel Ferrara Quotes

My life is proof that I don't need you to do what I do. If there's no one to see it, I'll watch it.

I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself. You're taught not to think too deeply about things.

It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

Mulberry Street was the beating heart of the Italian-American experience, but you don't find those gangsters now. I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

I direct, and I make movies I can't finance.

I can't raise money. I can't sell anything. I make things.

I grew up in the Bronx. I'm into rap music.

When I talk about drugs and alcohol, I'm talking about sex addiction, gambling addiction, eating addiction, throwing-up addiction. I'm not talking about mental illness.

The last day of your life is still going to be a day.

The world is constantly changing. You're constantly learning and you have to be willing to get off your mark, and get off your spot and take that knowledge you have not to fix yourself into a place but to keep going.

I'm about my characters.

My job is going to be to direct the film - I'm going to do it. And that's where my job ends.

With 'New Rose Hotel,' I knew that I was getting paid a $100,000 fee to write, produce, and direct, and that's all I was going to get.

I don't need to push myself. I don't need to sharpen my own knife and slit my throat. I'm trying to chill it and find an equilibrium and a balance to my work.

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

In the film business, it's basically honor among thieves.

I don't know what DVD commentaries are about.

I'd like to strangle the person who came up with that concept.

I grew up in the '60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn't that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

My grandfather lived to be 96 years old.

He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy. He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him, he brought his food with him, he brought his language with him, he never spoke a word of English.

I don't care if I get $50 million to do a film.

There's a difference between the world ending tomorrow and just drinking and drugging yourself to death.

A script is not a piece of literature, it's a process.

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.

My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.

That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you.

No one can stop me from talking about my movie.

I'm a lapsed Buddhist like I'm a lapsed Catholic. I take it to a point.

The actors that I love to work with, they're hard on me. They're pushing me.

But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me.

I'm not a big fan of talking about dying. And then I make a movie where I kill everybody.

I come from a world where you get the film done, that's a success.

Movies are only the result of where we are as human beings.

I'm in a house where if the washing machine shuts off, it sings a song.

If iPad gets a message, it sings a song. I'm living in a real postmodern time - every single thing sings to you to tell you it's started, it's stopped, you've got a message, you didn't get a message.

Making money is not gonna change anything about what I am, except I won't answer the door.

Life is what happens when you're doing other things, right?

A lifetime isn't long enough to learn how to make films.

I don't want to live anywhere where I'm breathing two million cars' fumes and paying a zillion dollars for the right to be totally hassled.

I don't have a problem with Werner Herzog.

The more you get into any religion, it becomes the same.

It really becomes how you treat other people and how you get outside yourself. How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this 'I, me, mine' type of thing.