I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor,' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like, 'God, five years have gone by.'

I think that finding a way into somebody’s life that’s sort of off from a side angle can tell you more about that person than a greatest hits approach.

There’s nothing quite as good as folding up into a book and shutting the world outside.

I do think that’s so much a part of what being a director is – in working with actors – to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be.

Because his basic idea that he got from the study of gall wasps is that everyone’s sexuality is unique.

But the imposition of morality onto science, – where it does not belong – has become rampant in recent years.

It’s in the nature of television to restrain the spontaneity of a live event. Things become more and more prepackaged.

There’s no question that Whale’s movies are classics. They were wonderful, and successful.

It’s an odd thing to go to New York to shoot a movie that is set in Indiana.

When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years – which are the gay movement and the women’s movement – I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those.