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" I love actors, and I'm very protective of them. I trust them. It's a mutual trust. "

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" 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 wanted to make a black 'Dynasty.' "

" I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films. "

" My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie. "

" I was the oldest of five children, each about a year apart, and my mother, bless her heart, had her hands full. "

" I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed. "

" I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff. "

" I've met Shonda Rhimes a few times, and certainly she's an inspiration for me in television. "

" I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes. "

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

" I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices. "

" I think it's very important that we don't sound like militants. Often what we do is we give a comment, and because it comes across with passion, then we're 'angry black people.' "

" I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face. "

" My kids tell me to Instagram, so I do that. I have a few thousand followers. "

" With TV, you're in people's houses every night. And you have so much time to tell stories. I don't know why I didn't do it before. "

" I want to go to places that are unexpected of me because people really think they have me pegged. "

" I worked at Warner Bros. for a while. I was the head of the minority talent casting. It was like pre-Spike Lee and post-blaxploitation era. "

" I've had all types of beautiful girls tell me that they ugly when they look in the mirror, as if it's someone else's reflection they see. "

" While I am not a musician, I love music. I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. Everything from hard core rap to the soundtrack from the original 'Cinderella.' "

" I'm not going to be labeled a black filmmaker. I am not here to just tell black stories. I'm here to tell all kinds of stories, musicals and dramas. "

" I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave. "

" I don't know whether everybody likes the films that I do. I know that I love them, and I believe the way that I raise my kids that they will love them, and that's what most important to me. "

" 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 believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated. "

" Putting on a movie is like going to war - for me, at least. It's all about time; time is money, and we don't have it. So it's all about getting to know each other intimately quickly. You are with family members that you like or don't like, but you can't leave them because you're stuck with them. "

" 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. "

" Here's the thing: I think the media underestimates the intelligence of the moviegoer. We need to be fulfilled. People want to sit down and think, and I try to make people think. "

" At 19, I was in the streets making money. I was surviving. "

" I think this last film I finished, 'The Butler,' is the closest I will come to as a work-for-hire. "

" I have a very clear vision, and I come from film, where director is God, so if there's a clash, it's painful. "