You know who a role model for me is? George Ballanchine.

I'd love to talk to Joaquin Phoenix because he's a very private guy. Also, he's creating a new kind of sexy leading man. To me, his face is new and might be legendary someday.

All I want are high heels, high heels. If I was a girl, I'd wear a lot of high heels. High, stiletto heels.

That's one thing about fashion that you really shouldn't be-you can't be melancholy in fashion because people don't respond to it.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

Sometimes I'm really dressed up, and it really turns me on.

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.

Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

I don't want to offend people.

You're not working with models, you're working with real women who have, like, anatomy. Models do not have anatomy.

Everyone asks, Will he make it, will she make it? You never make it.

I have a lot of obligations.

What if Woody Allen called me and said, I'm working on this movie and there's a really divine role for you. We want exactly you! It would be such a fantasy. Forget it! My idol, Woody Allen!

Mick Jagger, his face was very new. It became a sex symbol.

Just when I think I hate fashion, I hate clothes, I'm seized by this crazy thing that I have to do. I have this little studio now where I just draw. I can be in the room for three days and not even look up.

I'm not trying to be the next Joan Rivers.

I don't like people to feel completely described by the clothes they wear of mine. I want them to feel that they're describing themselves.

If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.

I'd love to talk to Angelina Jolie. On my show I would love her because she's a mysterious, mysterious figure.

Half the time I don't even think about it, I just throw something on because I'm so late or so busy.

Either it works or it doesn't.

The more relaxed you can get, the better you'll do.

When someone says you can't do what you know you can do, then you can't do anything.

You know who a role model for me is? George Ballanchine.

What you do, you don't think of as a product.

If I just do it, it will take less time than telling someone what I'm thinking, and have them free associate, and then come back to me and I'll hate it and I'll have to redo it.

The reason people like to watch ball games is because they don't really know exactly what's going to happen from moment to moment. That's why you watch the entire thing.

I'm so involved in melancholy.

How do I do it? I don't know how I wouldn't do it - that's the thing.

The last thing I want to become is one of those talking heads where everything is satiny smooth and you know what the next question is going to be.

You don't necessarily live for the moment; you live for hope-what you're going to get, what you're going to say, what you're going to think.

When people ask, Do you like children? I always say, I like some children, yes. Some children I don't like.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.

People say it's really the press who create those soundbites about fashion. That's what sells magazines and clothes.

Being a fashion designers its almost like being a doctor. You can touch a person because they cough and you can tell whether theyre ill.

You cant be melancholy in fashion because people dont respond to it.

The marketing costs are insane now. So even if you've got a picture like 'Flipped' which cost under $14 million, or $13.5 million, you're still going to spend on an national basis, if you release with a good national release, you're still going to spend, you know, $30-$40 million.

Yeah, I made it. It sneaks up on you. You're some schmuck and you wake up one day and you go, Good God, I'm the cheese.

Its okay to laugh in the bedroom so long as you dont point

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own.

I never, absolutely never, keep people waiting.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the same-sex marriage bill, my blood was boiling. I had been silent, but that night, Brad and I watched the news and saw all these young people pouring out on Santa Monica Boulevard venting their rage, and I said, 'I have to speak out.'

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

The Bush administration does not desire to see Islam practiced in its pristine purity.

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.