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

In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

Kinsey was six foot five, and he had this leader of men quality.

We’re still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it’s like, ‘God, five years have gone by.

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.

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.

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.

I started having a panic attack seeing my name in that list of people. It was pretty overwhelming.

The humiliation of the North is complete and overwhelming.

I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions – it’s overwhelming, because things don’t fade for me.

The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.

My father insisted that I learnt the Koran and encouraged me to understand the basic traditions and beliefs of Islam but without imposing any particular views. He was an overwhelming personality but open-minded and liberal.

The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.

Everything seems overwhelming when you stand back and look at the totality of it. I build a lot of stuff and it would all seem impossible if I didn’t break it down piece by piece, stage by stage.

The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it