I'm not trying to be a finger-wagger at society. I sort of start with myself.

It's easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that's really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality.

I think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.

You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

There was an expression of intensity in dance that was so compelling to me that I wanted a piece of that action.

I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.

I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library, the main branch. I was one of those people. If you ever spend a good amount of time there, you realize there are people who spend the entire day there. They're bookish homeless people.