Ava DuVernay Quotes

If your dream only includes you, it's too small.

Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.

Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.

Don't wait for permission to do something creative.

If you're doing something outside of dominant culture there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.

When you're in your lane, there's no traffic.

We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

I've passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it's not happening to you; it's happening for you.

Stop asking, start doing.

If your work is solid, it really doesn't matter what people you know because good work starts to rise to the top.

Because my mom always told me that I could. From a very early age, I felt comfortable leading.

The traditional ways to make a film, the traditional ways to share a film, have all collapsed. There are no gatekeepers, per se, any more, and anything can be done. Truly, I feel that.

I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

If you have the ability to do something, you should do it.

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

We're a new world and it's not pretty. It's going to be for the brave to figure out how to survive in this.

Hollywood needs more women directors, and Mama Ava needs a carafe and a half of that sweet vino divino.

I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.

When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done.

Netflix represents, as well as all the streaming services, something that I've been talking about being so important to inclusive voices around films.

Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.

I know that there are a lot of great women that have gone before me, so it's important to acknowledge them.

At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

When I look in the mirror, I see a woman who is happy.

For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.

Those [old] days are gone... accept the reality and do it.

I don't want to say that in a place that's negative about what the fear is. I just want to be a realist.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.

You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.

As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.

Historically, you've had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people.

All these women had directed movies that I loved on the film festival circuit, but couldn't get a job making television. That's how locked down TV is.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

I know that sounds a little bit corny, but I've found some solace in that. I hope art can continue to do that for people, I really do.

The fact that we have people who have headed up oil corporations now assigned to places in cabinet.

I think there are pieces of the film [Age Of Trump] that are even more emotionally resonant and more vital to talk about than ever.

I think there are a lot of people in this industry that have the ability, that have the position, they have the opportunity, they have the privilege to call the shots and could do it too.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

More people have seen 13th on Netflix than have seen all my films put together between the Sundance winners and Selma, and the whole international distribution of film.

I think I am a little jealous of women who have great girlfriends as adults.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

Filmmakers need to realize that their job isn't done when they lock picture. We must see our films through.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

I wish I could be the black woman Soderbergh, and put the camera on my shoulder and shoot beautifully while I directed.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

I just don't think there's a lot of support for the woman's voice in cinema, and it becomes really difficult to raise that money and start again every time.

I don't understand the iPhone. I just don't get it. Don't ya'll have to write serious emails throughout the day? How can you possibly manage detailed missives on a phone with no keys?