Well there's nobody who has a more supportive husband than I do, and he has a business that he runs, and it's his own business, so he has work to do, my kids have school to do, I mean, people have - there are other things in life besides politics.

Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.

The response to Pride has been so overwhelming. I mean, people have really loved it. And it's so rewarding because we had such a fun time making that film, and it was made with so much heart, that it's lovely that people seem to be responding in kind to that.

With the 'Silly Boy' track, I mean, people knew about it, but it wasn't really like, 'oh that's Eva Simons.' But when 'Take Over Control' came out, that's when people started to get interested in me personally, which is great because it was something I really believed in.

Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.

I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make.

I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn't become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City.

I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'

You can tell on-stage when a joke's starting to lose its pop. It doesn't mean people don't want to hear it anymore; it means I don't want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they've never heard.

What was interesting about Trump, I mean, people always say they want a non-politician. Well, you got it with Donald Trump. And there's good to that, and there's bad to that. The bad is that he can be distracted by talking about these stupid things that - I promise you, no one cares about his taxes.

I mean, people have created great shows, produced wonderful television, and nobody tunes in. For whatever reason, it just doesn't resonate with the masses. And vice versa, people have produced some really crappy television and mediocre stuff, and for some reason it hits. And there's no rhyme or reason.

There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad.

Dallas is an extraordinary place in it's own right. The first thing about Dallas that you can't get away from, particularly when I arrived, you've got no idea of the heat in this place. It's over 100 degrees, and with that the humidity is ridiculous. I mean, people don't live here, armadillos live here.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I don't mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

My inspirations come from everywhere. It's important to look at everything and anything. I think what I create is serious fashion, but I don't want to keep my focus on that. You have to look at a lot of different things. I mean, people are always surprised when they find out that my favorite show is 'RuPaul's Drag Race.'

It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.

We need to be creative, on the cutting edge, challenged, and it's really hard going. It's relentless, and we're relentless, and we have a history of breaking engineers, producers. I mean, people come out of working with U2 and just go, 'I just don't know what's happened; it feels like a lifetime has passed by.' And that's just the way we work.

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