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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. "

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" 'Empire' was a very traumatic experience for me. It was very schizophrenic, and it wasn't what I expected it to be. "

" I'm a filmmaker. I'm always searching for the truth in everything I do. I demand it from my writing partner and my crew, actors, and so hopefully, we're making people think. "

" 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. "

" 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 moved on to a nursing agency as a receptionist just to get a job, and ended up managing it, which led to me opening my own - say your mom is sick and needs someone to help her, then you call something like what I had: a home health agency. "

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

" I come from a family of domestics. I think most African-Americans of my age do. They were trusted by their bosses. I have met so many white people that spent more time with their nannies than they have with their own parents. "

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

" I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes. "

" I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff. "

" I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated. "

" I love actors, and I'm very protective of them. I trust them. It's a mutual trust. "

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

" 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? "

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

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

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

" I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave. "

" 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 went back-to-back from 'Paperboy' to 'Butler,' literally with no break. "

" At 19, I was in the streets making money. I was surviving. "

" I was always in trouble. I was mischievous. And movies were always a part of my world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Theater was always in the backdrop. Nursing was a way to pay the bills. I wasn't a nurse; I had a nursing agency. "

" What attracts me to material are characters that I know - characters that I know people don't know but I know - and bringing them to the screen. Spotlighting voices that have not been heard before on screen. "

" My mom knew early on that I was gay, and she knew that I had to get out of the ghetto. "

" In L.A., I was a talent manager for many years. I represented many African-American actors. After a while, I became disheartened over the shortage of roles for African Americans. "

" 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. "