As a people we do not need anyone else's stamp of approval.

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.

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.

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I'm good with getting older, because I feel like one day, I know I will love myself. I can't imagine staying at one age. Ideally, I'd want to be 20 physically but 40 mentally.

And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

Loneliness, tenderness, high society, notoriety, you fight for the throne and you travel alone.

O foolish anxiety of wretched man, how inconclusive are the arguments which make thee beat thy wings below!

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

Just because we go through a difficult situation, it doesn’t mean that the future is predetermined. The future is very much in our hands, in our actions.

Knitting is a boon for those of us who are easily bored. I take my knitting everywhere to take the edge off of moments that would otherwise drive me stark raving mad.

If you can do that - if you run, hit, run the bases, hit with power, field, throw and do all other things that are part of the game - then you're a good ballplayer.