It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy in a relationship like that [of an artist and a gallery manager], to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.

He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.

To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.

When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.

I gave you things I wasn't sure I even had.

If you read my short stories, there's a lot of sex in those in all different ways. To me, it's a really good, useful thing to get to have in a story. And in a movie, it's amazing, because you actually get to show things.