"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It’s from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? (singing) ‘I am the carpenter…"