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" It's okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are. "

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" Going into a room and saying, 'I'm a black lesbian' - it's a strike against you. "

" We have to create a range, and we have to let there be possibilities. And basically, by showing there are different types of people, you write down the monolith. You stop having to represent for all black people when you allow there to be different types represented. "

" 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. "

" Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother's father fought in World War II, and then my father's father fought in Korea. And they're both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana - and they never went back home. "

" When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn't go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas. "

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

" I grew up in Nashville in a white suburb. We lived next to a Klan member. We didn't see hoods, but my dad knew that guy was a Grand Dragon. "

" You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear. "

" Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle. "

" People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you're being yourself was a tension that I could relate to. "

" I was interested with exploring the idea of who gets to be in possession of the land - how it's sometimes impossible to go back home, how family can be the thing that drags you down. "

" Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way. "

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

" I started out at Procter & Gamble marketing panty liners, so basically selling women insecurity. I thought there must be more to life than this. Then I was on set for a Dr. Scholl's commercial, and I asked one of the execs, 'How do you get a job behind the camera?' and he said, 'Film school.' So I quit and applied to NYU. "

" Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes. "

" Shooting on film is great because it imparts discipline: What do you need to see so you're not finding it in the camera. When I'm shooting, I have the scene in mind, where I'm going to have certain lines. I learned to overlap and to shoot more than I think I need. That was the learning curve. "

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

" 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. "

" For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen. "

" A producer has to want you. And if the producer trusts you and asks for your vision, it frees you up so much, not having to explain or fight for every decision. You're allowed to create. "

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" I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea. "

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

" I'm always choosing the hard things, the things that aren't easy. "

" History informs where we are and how we got here. "