All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.

I think black people have to be in control of their own image because film is a powerful medium. We can't just sit back and let other people define our existence.

There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten.

It gets dangerous when you start allowing people to validate your work.

Don't think that because you haven't heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.

When you love something it's not a job anymore.

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.

I think people who have faults are a lot more interesting than people who are perfect.

Power is knowing your past.

And in the ocean I will fly to the bottomless pit of darkness

No one knows who they are more than someone who changes their identity (before I became a farmer, I was a leadership coach).

My heart ist meltingI love youDrops of Gold

It's not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.

This whole world is mind's world, the product of the mind.

Hillary Clinton's policies obviously didn't work. What you have to do is look at Libya, look at anything you want to look at and to have it work.

Im actually, for the most part, a complete agnostic politically.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

That word sassy - it haunts me. I keep getting the sassy thing.