I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.

In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.

There's no need to be tragic or destroy yourself or jump off a cliff. That's no longer the paradigm I wish to follow, or that anyone should follow. It is not necessary to be tragic. It's bullshit that women can't have it all. Why not? Other people do.

Bettie Page was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up.

People make films about all kinds of relationships, but they won't do these extremely intense platonic love affairs that happen between young girls. In a way they are more intense than anything else you ever have, and that's what I wanted to make a film about, though it was in the context of a horror film.

I wonder if Bettie Page original gay cult had something to do with the ironies inherent in her image, as well as her innate fabulousness as an image.

I realized you can always make money; you just do a lot of things.