Quotes

If you spend an hour and a half in a movie theater, it should challenge you.

I had a tiny bit of fashion training, but not really. I had no formal training as a film director either.

[observation, 2016] I am hoping for a Democratic president - though a female President won't be able to wear my clothes because they're too expensive. And I think that's absolutely right.

People don't understand it and they will probably laugh when they read this, but fashion is one of the most grueling, brutal industries in the world because we create a constant stream of product that is perishable. And it's speeding up so fast. People consume. They're bored. They consume. They're bored. They consume. They're bored.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think there needs to be - I don't really like the word moral - a moral to the story. You need to think about it. Things can be entertaining, but if you leave the theater and it doesn't stay with you, doesn't haunt you, doesn't challenge you, then it's not successful, for me. So I hope to make films that make one think. [2016]

I'm a pretty calm person. That came from living in Italy for a long time. Nothing works, nothing is on time. You have to learn to deal with it.

All the characters I write in my screenplays have a bit of me in them. It would be impossible not to - I'm there speaking the words and writing them down.

[2023 interview] There are several reasons I sold my company. I felt, after 35 years, I had said everything I could say with fashion. It's important to know when to get off the stage. I loved making the two films that I made. That was the most fun I've ever had in my entire life. I'm 62. Hopefully, I'll remain somewhat together until 82. So I wanna spend the next 20 years of my life making films. And the clock is ticking. As a director, it takes three years to make a movie. I have maybe time for five more movies in my life. So they have to be meaningful. One is an original, completely from scratch. An extremely personal thing. Then another is a book from Anne Rice. We started the process in 2004, while she was alive, obviously.

[2016 interview, on Nocturnal Animals (2016)] Susan is quite literally me, she's someone who has material things but realizes - maybe this happened to me seven or eight years ago - those aren't the things that are important. She is struggling with the world that I live in: the world of absurd rich people, the hollowness and emptiness I perceive in our culture. Life can be an endless, unfulfilling quest for some sort of happiness that is elusive, because the whole concept of happiness as peddled by our culture doesn't exist. Nobody lives happily ever after. If you buy this and do that and build this house, you're not going to be happy. Life is happy, sad, tragic, joyful. But that's not what we're taught, that's not what our culture pounds into our heads.