Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is. The lengths people go to — and the extremes and the conditions and the mental exercises and guilt and shame and happiness that everybody goes through — and what they'll do for sex is never-ending and mind-boggling and very interesting to me. And I don't think a lot of times people choose any of it.

I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.

The way I photograph... in many ways it's directed by chance and all my mistakes, which are often the best stuff. I found that no matter if it's the same tape, the same TV, and the same camera, I can never duplicate an image... your arm jiggles, there's just too much chance. And I never put it on pause, or use any of that fancy equipment.

I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.

Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"

At the premiere of Hairspray on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein's mom said to my mom, "Didn't we raise great sons?" and my mother just started sobbing, because I'm sure they'd both been through other nights when people didn't say that.

I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had.