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" I always question if somebody else is going to love my films. I think that's what art is about - it's so individual. "

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" If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me. "

" I'm always workin', man. I gotta pay the light bills. "

" I came to Hollywood to write and found out I don't have the attention span. "

" I moved on to a nursing agency as a receptionist just to get a job, and ended up managing it, which led to me opening my own - say your mom is sick and needs someone to help her, then you call something like what I had: a home health agency. "

" I think that, as African-Americans, oftentimes we have to put ourselves on pedestals as opposed to really looking at ourselves and trying to understand ourselves and become better people. We always have to be on pedestals. "

" What attracts me to material are characters that I know - characters that I know people don't know but I know - and bringing them to the screen. Spotlighting voices that have not been heard before on screen. "

" When you're paying everybody nothing, I mean, they have homes to pay for. And my movies are like putting on theater. Nicole Kidman is at craft services, and John Cusack is moving furniture; there are no egos. The only ego is the story. "

" I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker. "

" My dad was a cop. My mom worked at various jobs - she worked as a homemaker, a bank teller, a bartender. "

" Most times when I do a film, it starts out with one idea and ends up not being what I thought it was going to be. "

" Some of the most provocative TV that I'm inspired by is in the U.K. You guys take it for granted, but in America, we can't do it. "

" When people don't like the film, I can take a bullet. I don't mind you talking about me, but I'm protective of my actors, because they bared their soul for me. "

" Rarely do celebrities and actors speak up for what they believe in. "

" I love black women. I live for them. They are everything to me. I'm obsessed with them. They are sophisticated, resilient and smarter than me. "

" In L.A., I was a talent manager for many years. I represented many African-American actors. After a while, I became disheartened over the shortage of roles for African Americans. "

" To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture. We're making a movie. We're making it like we're putting on a play. "

" I come from a family of domestics. I think most African-Americans of my age do. They were trusted by their bosses. I have met so many white people that spent more time with their nannies than they have with their own parents. "

" I don't know - I haven't seen any of my movies after I finish them. I leave the editing room; I don't go back. "

" I'm a filmmaker. I'm always searching for the truth in everything I do. I demand it from my writing partner and my crew, actors, and so hopefully, we're making people think. "

" I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people. "

" America is fickle. You never know what they're going to go for. "

" I don't work with fear, and I don't work with actors that are fearful. "

" I went to school at Radnor High School. And I went to a liberal arts college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Lindenwood College. "

" My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me. "

" I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world. "

African-American

" I like to show the grey area in all my characters. "

" I want to learn. I want to stretch my muscles as a director and work under different circumstances. "

" Theater was always in the backdrop. Nursing was a way to pay the bills. I wasn't a nurse; I had a nursing agency. "

" When you have a lot of siblings, you always do something to feel special. "

" I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it. "