There's some movies I watch, they're kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.

I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans, they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose, they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion, they just have another type of intelligence.

It's a very sweet and often problematic situation where people feel like they know me and they're concerned for me. It creates these strange little intimate moments.

There's some things that you learn as you're shooting, and as you're editing that are key, because when you start you don't have the brain that can finish it. You don't really know what it is, and that's the key job; figuring out what you actually have, not what you're dreaming of having.

I can't tell a joke to save my soul. It's just not my thing, though I love to listen to jokes.

Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

The one thing you're most reluctant to tell. That's where the comedy is.

It's your outlook on life that counts. If you take yourself lightly and don't take yourself too seriously, pretty soon you can find the humor in our everyday lives. And sometimes it can be a lifesaver.