I do try not to dwell on the past too much, because I have a tendency to do that, and as I've gotten older, I've gotten very good at distancing myself from shoulda, woulda, coulda.

I grew up in an environment where it was permittable to use violence to solve a problem. But it was not permittable ever to call the police under any circumstances. That was the kind of doctrine of my household. My dad was a career-long criminal, and you weren't calling the police for any reason.

You go through this business and you meet people that you bond with, and you get to go make movies with them. It's wonderful. What I've always dreamt of, in my career, is to have a brotherhood of collaborators, and go in and out of working with them. I'm just starting to get that, and it's really lovely.

In the early part of your career you are always compared with somebody until you can stand on your own two feet.

In 1983, I was working at an art gallery in Los Angeles and going to film school at Los Angeles City College. At that time, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young painter and was visiting L.A. for his first show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.

The biggest thing I'm seeing - and I have to be careful what I say here - is that people are tired of the old guard and the familiar brands. They're looking for more individuality and creativity, and that's coming out of this whole new wave of younger brands: Thom Browne, Michael Bastian, Robert Geller, myself.