My favorite characters are people who think they're normal but they're not. I live in Baltimore, and it's full of people like that. I've also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they're crazy, but they're completely normal.

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

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.

What's fascinating to me is that in rich-kid schools, it's better to be gay. No one is discriminated against because they're gay in a rich-kid school. But in poor-kid schools, it's often not the same. So being gay is a class issue now.

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

I am on the road all the time. Whether I'm in Paris or in a small college town in Texas, I can't tell the difference, and that's good. You don't have to leave where you were born to be cool anymore.

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.