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" For me, books were my source of affirmation. Alice Walker, Audrey Lord - it was these authors who wrote about their experiences. It was this weird thing where I was censored in terms of what I could watch but not in terms of what I could read. "

Dee Rees

Weird

Books

Watch

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" I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea. "

" I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn't get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I'd understand the world. "

" When you choose the hard things, it takes longer than you think to get it done, and if you choose the hard thing and have a very particular way you want to do them and are uncompromising in that, then sometimes it takes even longer. "

" You can't be limited by your own experience. "

" I was never physically abused, but when I came out to my parents late in life, when I was 27, they definitely had an intervention. "

" I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before. "

Dee Rees

Interesting

Character

" It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds. "

" You're your own person, and it's about you. I'm my own person, and it's about me. Everyone has their own life. "

Dee Rees

Person

You

" For kids who are struggling, who are of faith, just reconciling yourself to the fact that God loves you, accepts you for who you are, is a big step in the healing, especially when your biological family is unaccepting of you. "

" I'd go to lesbian parties. I felt like I wasn't hard enough to be butch, but I wasn't wearing heels and a skirt - I wasn't femme - so I felt like I was sort of invisible. "

Dee Rees

Hard

Heels

" I'm interested in characters and relationships. "

" Art makes you see people as individual, unique human beings. Art, in that way, allows us to see each other in particulate, as opposed to in aggregate. "

" In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about. "

Dee Rees

New York

Parents

" You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look. "

" I definitely felt the desire to, like - I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country. "

" My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains. "

" We have to create a range, and we have to let there be possibilities. And basically, by showing there are different types of people, you write down the monolith. You stop having to represent for all black people when you allow there to be different types represented. "

" In an industry that's uncertain and when you're in a lot of situations that are anxiety-causing, to have someone there who has your back unconditionally and cares for you and the material and would give anything to make sure everything is OK, makes you feel so much better. It gives you a sense of security as an artist. "

" When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn't go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas. "

" I'm always choosing the hard things, the things that aren't easy. "

" There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color. "

" I think art breaks down otherness. "

" I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said 'Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?' And she's like 'Oh, no, you can't come to my house 'cause my parents don't like black people.' "

" You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear. "

" Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes. "

" When I'm on set, I know what I want. "

" I had originally written 'Pariah' as a feature, and we shot the first act as a short film, and then we used the short as a marketing tool to fundraise for the feature. "

" I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. "

" Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you're being yourself was a tension that I could relate to. "

" Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.' "

Dee Rees

Want

Hold