“That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.”

Kinsey thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church.

Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together – that’s the most complicated thing we all face.

So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It’s a melodrama.

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

Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.

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

But you really – I always think that a director has got to adapt to whatever the needs of the actor are. You know, so if you take someone like Eddie Murphy, who is not a big fan of rehearsal.

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

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.

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.

My idea of a beach holiday is going to New York for two weeks, just going and hanging out.

For me, someone like the Eddie Murphy character doesn’t live anywhere; he lives on a stage and when he’s not on the stage he’s on a bus getting to the next stage.

There were moments on the set when the depth of the cast of ‘Dreamgirls’ was almost overwhelming to me.

I wanted to make connections between Whale’s past and present.

There’s nothing quite as good as folding up into a book and shutting the world outside.If I pick the right one I can be beautiful, or fall in love, or live happily ever after. Maybe even all three.

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

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that’s the foundation for everything great.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.

Magicians can do more by means of faith than physicians by the truth.

Black-and-whit e always looks modern, whatever that word means.