There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody. A lot of times I have, and the song wasn't that good, but I would get lost in that melody, and I'd want to do the song.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.

From the beginning I thought about working with the body in movement, the space between the body and clothes. I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh

There are so few roles out there. And even if it is a film that could be led by a black actress, how many times is that film going to get funded? Let's just be real. But it's not just black people. It's Asians, it's Hispanic people if you're not Salma Hayek. It's hard. It's hard to get films funded.

I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.