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" I started casting. I cast music videos, but I kept getting fired from jobs because I was iconoclastic in my ways of casting. "

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" Most of my friends are dead. I watched friends die in my arms at 5, 6, 8. When I grew up, the rest of my friends died of AIDS. "

" Some of my friends don't have a cell phone. Patti LaBelle doesn't have a cell phone. "

" 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. "

" Stars make money on real movies. They make big money on real movies. To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture. "

" It's hard for me to accept love. I wish I could lie to you and tell you that it's easy for me, but it's not. "

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

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

" 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 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

" 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 see the world from a very specific perspective. It is how I grew up. It is what I am proud of, and I vocalize it. And for those who have not experienced my experience, it is odd, and it's not mainstream. "

" I'm not really vegan. I'm vegan-ish. I have a piece of lamb every now and then. "

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

" 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 Tyler Perry. I'm not Dino De Laurentis. I think it's a bit much to put one's name in front of the film. It makes me uncomfortable. "

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

" That's the gift 'Precious' has given me. You really think you're telling a story about a fat black girl, and only fat black girls will understand it, and then you realize we're all Precious. "

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

" I think the father-son love story is a universal one which transcends color. "

" 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. "

" When I make movies, I don't ever go out there to please anyone other than myself. I never try to make a film for the masses. I just try to tell my story. "

" I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I want to live in my truth. Tell me you don't like me, and I know it. But when you don't tell me, and you work behind my back, it's a lie, and I don't know how to fight that. "

" I'm in a great place because I trust people behind the camera as I go off, and I still go back to my day job and do film. "

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