I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance.

I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

I'm starting to frighten myself, because I'm backsliding into my devil-may-care attitude. I'm sure it's going to catch up with me.

I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

I literally designed and built the sets myself, and I kind of liked it. I always gave myself eight weeks to do that - sometimes even 10 - and the shooting took five or six weeks.

I've been so lazy all my life. I used to literally lie on the couch, up until the age of 35, fearing that my bones were dissolving like sugar cubes, from disuse.

Those are my goals, you know. To be smart, tasteless, and feeling. Something to shoot for.

If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.

Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.

In many relationships that I've had people just try to own the other person.

You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

Hope is a fine killing thing.

I learned early on not to listen to either critique - the people who love you or the people who don't like you.

fear cannot exist when one is indifferent to life.

The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom.

Whatever hour God has blessed you with, take it with a grateful hand.

White people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

I wish his music came out of the closet and admit that it sucks.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

Confidence makes you willing to try harder and attracts the kind of support from others that makes "winning" possible.

Anything less than full justice is cruelty.