Dustin Lance Black Quotes

We’ve got the same problems any other gay couple and any other straight couple have. But it’s 90 percent great. And that’s better than most, I think. That’s me and Tom.

What’s beautiful about the journey of surrogacy is that relationship you build with your surrogate, when it’s done in places with good law. These aren’t women you stop speaking to once your child is born, this is someone who’s part of your family.

I’d say I’m not sure about Christianity, but I sure do like their Christ and the lessons about turning the other cheek, about forgiveness, of yourself and others.

The drive to be a parent is strong. It’s one of the most ingrained human traits there is.

I always thought that the film would be successful if we captured Harvey Milk, like the way Harvey really was-the personality, the humor, the corny bad jokes, all of it.

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

You know, growing up Mormon, I always got the sense that it was hard for the leaders of the church to feel like they were outside of Christianity. I think, you know Mormon people believe that they are Christian, and a lot of people outside of the Mormon Church, you know, don’t see them that way.

The things that I’m interested in directing are fiction, because then you’re not married to a particular reality.

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

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

Gay and lesbian people want to love and be loved. Some of us want to get married. Some want to have and build families. We want our kids to have their lives be a little bit better than what we’ve had.

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

For Coca-Cola to take a pro-diversity, pro-equality stance creates a lot of goodwill in the LGBT community.

There was a criticism of ‘Milk’ that I found truth in, which was that it was focused on gay white men.

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

People are always going to disagree politically, because we all come at the law from a different perspective with different needs.

If you do something with acceptance and kindness, you can create a true friendship.

My father, my Mormon father, took off when I was a young man and, or actually very young, I was like six years old, so a young boy.

How amazing is it that when a young gay or lesbian person has their first crush, no matter where they live in the country, they can imagine that all the way to marriage? When I first experienced a crush, in Texas, there was maybe a second of butterflies that were then dammed in by the fear of what that meant.

I was very lucky to hear the story of Harvey Milk, it was life-saving for me. I wanted to share it in case it helped others, but the story of one gay man isn’t going to do it.

I tend to read ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ online, and I go to the website for the BBC. I am a junkie when it comes to the news.

Gay people are more powerful when they work with lesbians. We become more powerful when we’re L, G, B and T.

You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.

Anyone who says a movie about history is a historical document is crazy.

Do I think J. Edgar Hoover was gay? Yes. Do I think he cross-dressed? No.

Here’s the thing with ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ it doesn’t matter how many times you watch it, it’s always interesting, and you’re always identifying with a different scene in the movie – at least I am.

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

I am hopeful that there are three or four Harvey Milks. It would be nice to have one in California and one in New York and one in Texas and Oklahoma-it would be fantastic. Maybe even one in Salt Lake City. I would like that.

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

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.

Through my political work in D.C., and having done ‘Milk’ I got to know a lot of gay octogenarians. They are lovely and they like to tell their stories, and I like hearing them.

I’m industrious. Ambitious. I’m like the gay Mitt Romney… That’s a terrible thing to say.

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

Have I always agreed with my Southern, military, Mormon family? Absolutely not. Have we always figured out how to get along? Yes! At the point at which politics supersedes the family and community, we’ve got a real problem.

Our brothers and sisters in the trans community, they showed up to every one of our marriage marches when it wasn’t necessarily what they needed. So we have to be there for them, use our lessons learned in the marriage fight – how to win when it’s difficult, how to change minds that are difficult to change.

Most of my family is still active in the Mormon Church. They live in Utah and Provo and Orem and Salt Lake City.

When I was in my twenties, I would always read my horoscope.

Too many of my heroes have been cut down, but do I want security guards? No. I’ve been offered them in the past. But the more you present yourself as someone afraid of being attacked, the more people see you as someone to attack.

I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it’s my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it ‘first’ and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, ‘You’ve passed your deadline.’

The octogenarians who have pictures of Hillary Clinton under their toilet-bowl covers – they’ve completely accepted me.

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

I like the gray movies. I don’t know if audiences always… it makes them work a little harder. And they have to work hard in ‘Hoover.’

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.

Being right is overrated! If someone is saying that they’re right about the future, that’s a claim only a fool would make.

I probably saw ‘When Harry Met Sally’ for the first time in college.

When I got the deal to do ‘J. Edgar,’ which was really the brainchild of Brian Grazer, ‘Milk’ hadn’t come out yet. We had just completed principal photography, and it was still basically this little film where we just really hoped someone would see it.

Mom got very heated about the new government policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In her view it was going to allow closeted gay people into her military and she was really against it… she just assumed I agreed with her opinions.

You can’t keep treating people differently under the law because of their differences. That’s not America. I dare say that’s not even a good conservative value. We’re all supposed to have an equal shot.

As a Southerner and as a Mormon you approach life in this aspirational way: ‘I will rise above my station.’

If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn’t stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.

My mom was paralyzed from polio at the age of 2, abandoned by her husband, left with a 2-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old, and so, we were raising her as much as she was raising us.

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.’

I’ve never encountered homophobia in casting from the studios or networks – not once, not ever. Where you encounter it is with the agents and the managers, they’re the ones who have an outdated notion of the price an actor might pay if it’s discovered that they’re LGBTQ.

I’m always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren’t always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.

I’m my mother’s son, so when it comes to altruism and understanding how to do things to benefit a person’s life… the women in my life have been much better than the men.

Hold onto power and you lose your moral compass.

Every single person in this world is a minority in one way or another. It just depends on how you slice the pie.

Growing up Mormon, you learn how to be very, very organized, and it’s a passionate group. I mean, in that way, it’s prepared me very well for Hollywood.

And the film that I’ve seen a million times is ‘When Harry Met Sally’ with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, and directed by Rob Reiner.

I never wanted to be a writer initially. It was not my thing, but I was an avid reader.

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.

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

Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America – Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.

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 think of the biopics I’ve written as exploring a more grown-up side of myself, through other characters’ lives.

I have no respect for someone who lies about their sexuality. At the very least say ‘no comment’, just keep your personal life personal. If you’re going to closet yourself, that sends a negative message.

Some people only look at the good stuff and some people only look at the bad stuff.

In this miraculous, beautiful universe of ours, where it’s an absolute miracle that our eyes and ears can witness it all, we somehow have bought into this lie that the highest plane of existence is whether we put an R or a D on our voter registration card. That’s insanity.

‘Milk’ had to be a financial success, following the success of ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ It had to make money so studios would develop other LGBT projects.

I was about 15 years old when I moved to the Bay area.

I had a lot of success for many years, and the critics had been so kind. Sometimes it’s good to get cut down to size a little bit.

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.

That’s what I learned most about directing on my own – you’ve got to build a family, a filmmaking family.

I love Jennifer Connelly.

There has been this resurgence in anti-LGBT language in the U.K. and the U.S., and the rest of the world. In the U.S. we’ve heard it with Trump’s rise. Here, I’ve heard language borrowed from the most conservative anti-gay voices in the U.S. used by some gay and lesbian people against trans people.