“Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.”

“I've always been led to believe that the ultimate goal for an author is the movie deal. Now I understand that the movie deal is merely a MEANS TO A MUCH HIGHER END: NAIL POLISH.”

“In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie," says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.”

“Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.”

“I believe in happy endings," I tell him, "And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.”

“I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.”