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 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.

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

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

Power is knowing your past.

When we are happy, we forget to eat. Then happiness is a primary need, even more important for life than nourishing the body.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

I talked about deporting people that are here illegally. They're here illegally. We either have a country or we don't. I talked about deporting people that are here illegally.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

That's when I use the word frustrating, when your body breaks down or your body doesn't do the things I'm asking it to do at my age, because I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.

There are no athiests in foxholes.