Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think art breaks down otherness.
My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur.
I like 'Paris is Burning' by Jennie Livington.
I still want to do features, but on my own terms.
History informs where we are and how we got here.
For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen.
I feel a lot of folks, like teenagers, can feel like outcasts.
I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.
I'm always choosing the hard things, the things that aren't easy.
To me, if you can do the Wicked Witch live, you can play anybody.
New York offers people the anonymity to be themselves without judgment.
It's okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are.
You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.
Going into a room and saying, 'I'm a black lesbian' - it's a strike against you.
Knowing what you want is not a shortcoming. Let people deal with their own anxieties.
I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.
Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.'
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.
I was going to study business administration at Florida A&M, at the height of Reaganomics.
I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.
As long as you tell the best story possible, you can trust that people will be able to connect to it.
Our statement's on the screen. Awards won't make it better, and a lack of awards won't make it worse.
I want people to get from 'Pariah' that it's okay to be you and not to check a box as a parent or child.
I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don't want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories!
There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.
My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains.
It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds.
'Mudbound' highlights the fact that we're still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.
Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.
For 'Pariah,' people were surprised Kim Wayans was there, but comedians have a dark streak; they're comedians for a reason.
We shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down.
I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.
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.
I think Charlottesville was shocking for some, but it wasn't for me or for my family, I mean, because I grew up in 1980s Nashville.
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 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.
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.
Once your film is done, you can't explain to people what something was supposed to be. You can't give them footnotes. It all has to be there.
I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.
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.
I love directing because you get to see your film come to life. You get to work with the actors. There's something magical about each piece of it.
Art makes you see people as individual, unique human beings. Art, in that way, allows us to see each other in particulate, as opposed to in aggregate.
For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.'
Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.
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.
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.
In New York there's a lot of interstitial spaces; spaces in between spaces, where you're changing, and New York gives you the anonymity to be who you want to be.
I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn't get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I'd understand the world.
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.'