Women have a greater verbal capacity.

You only get one world premiere of your directorial debut.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

If you do the math, films featuring women are a good investment.

I think there are many more stories still to be told about women.

There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.

There is so much talent out there and not quite as much opportunity.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

It's always healthy to be taken down a notch, even though it's humbling.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

I love so many different genres. I love crime films - and unusual coming-of-age pieces.

The brutality that can take place in a crime film heightens the tenderness that can also be there.

If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.

My M.F.A was in directing, and all the films I've made, for film school and after, I've written, directed and shot.

I think if you get your fifth script made, that's the fast track. But there's no guarantee any of them will get made.

My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.

My mother enjoyed few things more than investing in the underdogs and showing them that they were special and could achieve their dreams.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.

I devoted myself to writing for years without representation or a promise of anything. And there were times when I felt quite down about my prospects.

It's so easy today to get swept up in celebrity fixation and materialism and searching for some validation outside of yourself when we know it's really found within and through meaningful connections with other people.

'Precious' is strangely uplifting. It goes down into the valley but it also goes to the mountain tops. A lot of difficult realities are explored in 'Precious,' but the peaks make the valleys and the valleys make the peaks.

In these times of stress, snark, division and despair, I still suspect that two of the most important features we possess are imagination and a capacity for goodness. Those are qualities for which we will be remembered most fondly.

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

I often think about the many remarkable things that my personal computer can do which I never ask it to do. I probably use a small fraction of its capabilities. I often wonder if the same dynamic occurs with our capacity for creativity.

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

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