John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Our feet are planted in the real world, but we dance with angels and ghosts.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

The best things happen in the dark.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

There's something cool about being a stealth classic.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Bob Fosse, even though he wasn't gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the 'Hedwig' film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Humor without sadness underneath it feels cheap and aggressive.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent's is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

We're all weirdly single, middle-aged women with too much money who look to fill the void with too much shopping.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

You're on Facebook, and you're supposed to know your sexual orientation at 13... Nobody really knows what's going on at that time, and people seem to... know stuff, or they have to act like they do, and they make decisions before they really need to.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

The first rock stars were incredibly theatrical. Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley - they were theater artists.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

My favorite model of success is when people say, 'Nobody bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did started a band.'

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I am just touched at how strongly the real Hed-heads feel. It feels different from other kinds of devotees; maybe it's the way I felt with certain bands when I was a kid. It feels like a band more than a play.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I'm all for information diets, which are helpful for the mood and for the art.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.

John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell

It's the weird thing that actors do: You jumped across that building because the scene required it.