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" 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. "

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" As long as you tell the best story possible, you can trust that people will be able to connect to it. "

" 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. "

" My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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.' "

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

" Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes. "

" Our country is pathologically violent. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I want more images onscreen because when I was growing up, I think, like, that one kiss in 'The Color Purple' was the one thing that I had. Or 'The Watermelon Woman.' "

" I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I'd go to lesbian parties. I felt like I wasn't hard enough to be butch, but I wasn't wearing heels and a skirt - I wasn't femme - so I felt like I was sort of invisible. "

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

" 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 going to study business administration at Florida A&M, at the height of Reaganomics. "

" 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. "

" New York offers people the anonymity to be themselves without judgment. "

" I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something, or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently or think about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on. "

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

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

" When I'm on set, I know what I want. "

" 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. "

" Actors need to know why they're saying what they're saying, more than just learning their lines. "