"To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new."

"There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic."

"I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion."

"I'm sad about this, but we shouldn't have been married in the first place." - about his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley.

"Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild."

"I'm at the point now where I know I'm doing something right when a movie gets mixed reviews, because then I'm not in the box. I don't want to make it too easy for people and I don't want to make it too easy for myself. I want to try something unusual. I feel good about the bad reviews because I feel like I've affected them on some level. They may not know what I was trying to do but they felt something"

"I want to make all kinds of movies. I do want to make big movies that are a lot of fun to go to, but I also want to make movies that are going to stimulate some thought and maybe raise some awareness. And so please don't think you're gonna go on a roller-coaster ride with those movies."

"It's very risky for an actor who's a bankable star to make pictures like The Weather Man (2005) or Lord of War (2005) [also in current release], because they inevitably promote

them like big studio releases. And they're not big studio movies, they're more edgy, thought-provoking, independent-spirited films. What happens is, it goes into the computer, and everyone says they can't open the movie because they thought it was X when it actually was Y".

"I needed to change my name just to liberate myself and find out I could do it without walking into a Hollywood casting office with the name Coppola."

"Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?"