If you think someone's trying too hard, that's the worst thing they can do. To me, it's just desperate, never funny and never witty. It's kind of really old hat because just being shocking isn't enough. It has to change how you think about something. It has to startle you. It has to make you look at something and reconsider whether you're right. That's the whole point.

I hitchhiked at high school. My parents thought was a perfectly normal thing to do even though God knows I got blown a lot of times riding home from school.

The good guys in my movies mind their own business and they don't judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous, they judge other people without knowing the whole story, they want all the attention and they're mean spirited. So I think my films are politically correct in a weird way.

Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so I could have an abortion.

I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.

You have to think of a new way to completely surprise people who think they're hip. I always said you could make an NC-17 movie with no sex and no violence. Now I don't know what that could possibly be, but if you could think it up, you'd have a hit.

It`s great to be able to drive around and spy on people, which I do when I'm writing. People tell me the most personal things about their lives for no reason - on airplanes, everywhere I go. People just blurt out secrets. I'm not sure why. I think that they see in my films that nothing will make me uptight. I'm not going to judge them.