Director

It's really difficult for me to sit and watch anything that I do because I always think about what's there, and what there could be to make it even better.

I watched Sean Penn, you know, bring Harvey Milk to life. I was on the set every day.

I'm drawn to making films that in some way move the social conversation.

I think it's very important that, you know, gay actors get to play gay characters.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

There's a difference between fame and fame for fame's sake.

My mom would watch me giving speeches on TV and she'd call and say, 'I don't know who this son is.'

Just like my mom, when things get bad, I get quiet. The worse they get, the more silent I become.

Although my mom and I had often disagreed politically and personally, she'd led our family by example, instilling in us a can-do attitude that often defied reason - an optimism many would call foolish, ignorant, and naive, but an optimism that occasionally shocked our neighbors and our world with its brazen veracity.

One of the great things about being married to my husband, who is also an impossible dreamer, is that we just do things.

I am sick and tired of the myopia in the gay and lesbian movement. It'll doom the movement.

Having a son has made it all the more important for me to stay in close contact with my family in Texas and Arkansas, whom I know full well voted for Trump. Though I didn't, and have deep problems with this administration and many of them don't. But I'm not going to let that cut the tie from my son to his own history and family.

I hope we build a son who's strong enough to stand up for other people. And if Donald Trump is out there teaching folks how to build walls, we're hoping to instil in our son the ability to know how to take them down.

I get emotionally attached to someone if I talk to them on the street corner for five minutes.

The real power of any movement is how we work together with other social justice movements.

I think for too many decades, the politicians have driven a wedge between the gay and lesbian communities and the religious communities for their own benefit, and I think it's time to start to broach those divides.

I say to my pupils, 'You can pitch me any thing you've got, but tell me why you're the only person who can write it in the world. Keep digging.'

Children are raised by single parents all the time. Those children - I'd like to claim myself as one, I was raised by a single mother who raised me incredibly well.

I wrote 'Milk' for me. I wrote it for the younger version of me that had no clue that there are people who'd ever fought for my rights.

My problem is always the number of hours in a day, not the number of things I want to do.