- Henry Geldzahler: Andy is attracted by beauty, by evil, by innocence, by very basic things, most of which have to do, I think, with two aspects of his childhood. One of them is being starstruck by Hollywood, by the glamor. The glamor of the art world just wasn't enough, he had to get into the glamor of the film world. That was one of the impulses that moved him from painting into filmmaking. The other is, I think, his Catholicism, his involvement with the Church, his sense of Hell... Hell being a place not only that you go to sometimes after you die if you've been bad, but Hell as a place on earth that is to be looked at, felt deeply and then avoided.
- Henry Geldzahler: He's a bit of a sadist as well as a bit of a voyeur. That is, he likes to push his relationships as far as they'll go. And therefore, the people that he's close to, the superstars as it were, if he is a voyeur-sadist, they must be exhibitionist-masochists. I think that's the reason that the superstars burn out as fast as they do. They're pushed to the extreme of their behavior and then they're no longer interesting to watch.
- Barbara Rose: Andy has a kind of martyr complex and he just permits things to happen to him. He just lets whatever is going to happen happen and he lets people act as badly as they can. It's a kind of morality play that he's involved in. And so if people are evil, they act very evil around Andy because he permits anything. It's like the devil, anything goes.
- David Bourdon: I think Andy is quite conscious of everything that he's doing. He's a little but of a provocateur in that he always forsees what the reactions will be to a work before he starts it.