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" I've always thought that 'Dear White People' should live on as a TV show, so I'll leave it at that. "

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" I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with. "

" One of the things that I love about Robert Altman's movies is that, really, a Robert Altman movie is just a bunch of short films about various people told at the same time. "

" 'Blue is the Warmest Colour' - I'm not a lesbian, I'm not French, I'm not a woman, but I saw so much of myself in those women and in those characters. I saw different parts of myself than I ever would've seen if I hadn't seen that film. "

" 'Color-blind' comes up - people say 'Oh, I'm color-blind and therefore can't be accused of racism,' but I think that if we are going to have an honest dialogue about racism, we have to admit that people of color are having a different experience. "

" I took an internship at Focus Features while I was in film school. I was really interested in how specialty movies were marketed and found their audience despite being about topics that were outside of the mainstream. "

" Every movie has the thing it's about, and then, deep down, it has this thing that it's really about. 'Star Wars' is not really about a space opera, action, and the galactic quest. It's about self-doubt. "

" I never liked 'Donnie Darko' quite as much as my film school peers. "

" I never quite lived up to the image of the black man as I saw it growing up. I was never listening to the right music at the right time or wearing the right clothes at the right time. I was still listening to Michael Jackson, and everyone had sort of moved on to gangster rap. Alanis Morissette when everyone else was listening to En Vogue. "

" I think art is much more valuable when it's honest. If it's not honest, it's just propaganda. "

" Everybody else was quoting 2Pac, and I was running around with Green Day in my Walkman. Racially speaking, I wasn't cool or appropriate for any group. "

" I saw 'Beauty and the Beast' at eight years old in theatres and spent hours trying to recreate the majestic imagery of that story in a drawing notepad at home. "

" It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating. "

" Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others. "

" There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That's how 'Star Wars' happened. "

" For me it's just, I have too many ideas, man. It's a problem, actually. "

" I went to a school called Chapman University, which is a wonderful film school. It was a great program, but it was very white, and it was a culture shock for me because I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I went through what they call magnet schools, so my friends were like a Benetton ad. "

" Films with predominantly white casts can come in any form, tell any story, big or small. For black films, you have the light, fluffy rom-coms or 'Madea' movies, and then you have the black-torture awards movie. "

" I don't doubt that straight white men have identity issues and identity complexes and struggle with defining themselves. "

" Any time a black person has the audacity to tell everybody else that they're also human beings, they are confronted with all kinds of malice and violence and ill will. It's been that way since black people were brought to this country. "

" There is an obsession with black tragedy. If you see a black movie, it's typically historical, and it tends to deal with our pain. And listen, there have been some excellent films made in that vein, and there are some painful parts of black history that should be explored, but it is kind of weird that only those films bubble up to the surface. "

" Shonda Rhimes has figured it out, of getting multiracial casts on television and appealing to everybody. "

" Everyone at a performing arts schools is weird. The weirder you were, the better. If you weren't weird in some way, they'd look at you and be like, 'Who's that square?' "

" You can't get along in society without an identity. "

" I talk about being a 'what' to people. Like, being gay in mainstream society is a different kind of 'what' than being black. They don't always jive. It's confusing and leads to these really awkward personal stories that have just been in me for awhile. "

" It is a fine line between making fun of the right thing and making fun of the wrong thing. And the language oftentimes is the same. "

The Right Thing

" There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black. "

" I think I have a threshold for taking things too seriously. "

" Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year. "

" My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can? "

" When you're part of a society where you're constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night. "