"Traditionally there's this barrier between the people who make movies and the people who watch them, and I think it sucks. Making Hollywood this castle on a hill and crowning actors the "Stars" might have been exciting and even brought people together last century, but now it's grown kind of disgusting in its excesses and it's no longer bringing people together—it's keeping people apart. It always turns my stomach a little when, because I'm in movies and on TV, people sometimes treat me as if I'm somehow different from, even above, a normal person. But the emails, posts, and comments I've been trading recently with people through those aforementioned sites cause me no nausea; they inspire me. There's no nasty status predicated on "Fame" or "Fortune." There's just that beautiful thing, the point of all art in the first place: a connection between one individual and another."

“The cinematographer came up to me and said, 'You have to hit your mark exactly,'”

“To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse—we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light. In Mysterious Skin, none of the sex scenes are like that. They all are about the process that this character is going through—and he grows from each of those scenes. You couldn't have told the story any other way. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. I would be embarrassed if I was like, "Shit, everybody wants to look at my ass.”

“Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy. Celebrity doesn’t have anything to do with art or craft. It’s about being rich and thinking that you’re better than everybody else.”

“The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.”

“I didn’t really like doing commercials. You had to behave like you were on angel dust or something.”

“Sundance means a lot to me. This is my third one. People that come here who love movies. Everyone has the attitude that movies aren't just disposable entertainment - they can really mean something. I love that, because that's the way I feel about films.”