Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" When I first started going out to lesbian clubs, I felt a very binary recreation of hetero culture. There are butches and femmes, and I felt like I was neither of those things. I'm in a turtleneck and jeans and just learning to be comfortable in that space. I realized I don't have to be a certain way. "

" Filmmaking was the way I could write characters and not have to give them up to anybody. "

" Our statement's on the screen. Awards won't make it better, and a lack of awards won't make it worse. "

" 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. "

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

" There's a lot of power in saying no to big things that you don't want to do in order to say yes to the kind of things that really inspire you. "

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

" Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen. "

" I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don't want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories! "

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

" The only advice I can give is to surround yourself with people who are friends and people who believe in you and your material and who are going to help you take it to the next level. It doesn't mean you don't listen to criticism, but you listen to it and edit it, and you figure out what you can take. "

Surround Yourself

" Each moment is defined by a multitude of histories, the past constantly converging upon us, perpetually decaying and reforming itself on the steady pulse of now, now, now, now. "

" When you choose the hard things, it takes longer than you think to get it done, and if you choose the hard thing and have a very particular way you want to do them and are uncompromising in that, then sometimes it takes even longer. "

" I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. "

" To me, if you can do the Wicked Witch live, you can play anybody. "

" I grew up listening to Mary J. Blige's music. When I initially met her, it was like, 'Oh, wow. I'm meeting this woman whose music was the soundtrack of my college years.' "

" 'Mudbound,' you know, is about home. 'Mudbound' is about what it means to be a citizen, and 'Mudbound,' in fact, is set in this post-reconstruction era that we haven't really explored. You know, not since 'Sounder' have we even really explored that experience. "

" I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said 'Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?' And she's like 'Oh, no, you can't come to my house 'cause my parents don't like black people.' "

" You can't be limited by your own experience. "

" To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for. "

" 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. "

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

" For me, Sundance always felt big. It's not the only way to make your way, but for me, it was definitely that critical link between struggling artist, kind of working on my own, to actually working professionally and being connected and being seen. "

" I'm interested in characters and relationships. "

" With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.' "

" Art makes you see people as individual, unique human beings. Art, in that way, allows us to see each other in particulate, as opposed to in aggregate. "

" For 'Pariah,' people were surprised Kim Wayans was there, but comedians have a dark streak; they're comedians for a reason. "

" Before Charlottesville, it might have been easy to dismiss the plot of 'Mudbound' as no longer relevant. Now, I feel like audiences will be more receptive to the material - and to interrogating their personal histories after watching it. "

" I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer. "

" Filmmaking in general is my second career. I thought that writing wasn't practical, so I went to business school and got an MBA, and I worked three years in grant management. "