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.

Not wanting anyone to pop my bubble by speaking to me, I immediately began reading Lesbian Nuns, and that did the trick. No one attempted small talk.

Stop blaming your parents. If you're really angry at 60 years old, you're an idiot! You've got to work some of it out.

When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.

I'd rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the police force,' Esther used to rage to anyone who would listen.

It was a mystery to me. To that awful black-and-white farm, with that aunt who was dressed badly, with smelly farm animals around when she could live with winged monkeys and magic shoes and gay lions. I didn't get it.

Everything makes you who you are, so I was lucky that I had a good family that was horrified by what I wanted to do but was also supportive of it, right to the very end.