Michael Cimino -- bloated with undeserved self-esteem:

"Would you ask Picasso to explain Guernica?" Mr. Cimino demanded, with a straight face. "Would you ask Nabokov to explain Lolita? Would you ask Tolstoy about War and Peace? No, you wouldn't dare. It's like an old love affair, tired and worn out. People have tried to talk to me about it, and I've said it's all up on the screen. It's tired and tiring."

(Click here if you don't know about the fabled 1980 debacle that was Heaven's Gate, Cimino's first movie after winning the Oscar for the Deer Hunter.