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" For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.' "

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" 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. "

" Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother's father fought in World War II, and then my father's father fought in Korea. And they're both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana - and they never went back home. "

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

" Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way. "

" I started out at Procter & Gamble marketing panty liners, so basically selling women insecurity. I thought there must be more to life than this. Then I was on set for a Dr. Scholl's commercial, and I asked one of the execs, 'How do you get a job behind the camera?' and he said, 'Film school.' So I quit and applied to NYU. "

" I like 'Paris is Burning' by Jennie Livington. "

" 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. "

" I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something, or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently or think about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on. "

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

" Knowing what you want is not a shortcoming. Let people deal with their own anxieties. "

" 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. "

" My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur. "

" 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. "

" Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do. "

" I want people to get from 'Pariah' that it's okay to be you and not to check a box as a parent or child. "

" Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think 'Mudbound' reveals the interconnectiveness of our stories. You can't separate out threads of history and race as economic construct. 'Mudbound' makes it very plain. Race is about commerce; it's not an actual thing. It's a fiction that was created to basically divide resources unequally. "

" You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look. "

" With friendship, it's hard sometimes - you don't outgrow your friends, but you do question how people are friends to you in different ways and how it's okay to cultivate other relationships outside of that. "

" I can't put anything out that's not me. "

" I'm not a writer that writes every day. I just kind of have ideas. I jot them down when I have them, and when I have enough, I just start. And for me, I start more around noon, and I'm all about feeling. Once there's a theme, I can't not write. "

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

" The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that. "

" Our country is pathologically violent. "

" For each character, I try to understand what is driving them. "

" We shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down. "

" For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen. "