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

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" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" In an industry that's uncertain and when you're in a lot of situations that are anxiety-causing, to have someone there who has your back unconditionally and cares for you and the material and would give anything to make sure everything is OK, makes you feel so much better. It gives you a sense of security as an artist. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do. "

" If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are. "

" The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that. "

" 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.' "

" I'm interested in telling stories about characters that are interesting and who are challenging in some way, one that will make you think about them afterwards. "

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

" I was never physically abused, but when I came out to my parents late in life, when I was 27, they definitely had an intervention. "

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

" I definitely felt the desire to, like - I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 had this thing where I only wanted to work on original material, no adaptations, and obviously, that changed. I really wanted to have the resources and have the space and the time to tell stories that I've really cared about. I've kind of changed my approach, but I've gotten to do that, to tell stories that I really care about. "