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

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" 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'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 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. "

" 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. "

" I believe in life that you know that everything prepares you for the next thing - whether it's a hit, whether it's not a hit, whether it's a... your failures are your accomplishments because it makes you prepared for whatever it is that you are going to do next. "

" 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 had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels. "

" I went from off-off Broadway. I would direct plays in Baldwin Hills. Almost Tyler Perry-like, really trying to express myself in that and not really knowing how to, knowing acting in story, but not really knowing how to technically hold a camera. "

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

" My mission is to let black kids know that their dreams can happen. "

" 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. "

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

" Most actors want the audience to like them, and that leads to bad acting. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace. "

" 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. "

" 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 wanted to make a black 'Dynasty.' "

" Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to. "

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

" I look at my movies; I call my movies 'the kid.' It's like I'm giving birth. I'm in the cocoon, you know? "

" 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. "

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