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

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.

I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.

Try to get the important things right at all the time, even at the cost of being right.

I take your name whenever i give example of perfection...

It's nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don't really work like that.

In a society which really supported marriage the wife would be encouraged to go to the office and make love to her husband on the company's time and with its blessing.

Both of them are close to how I'd envisioned them. In Ico's case the design and in SotC's the visual look were very close to what I'd imagined.

The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example.

For me, the creative process for me always starts in a personal place. I step away from my iPod or any records or CDs.

The most common misconception about me is that I'm basically a jazz singer.

I could not extrapolate some emotion from any song after 1997 so I bought a drum machine and popped pills. The pink ones make me funny like elephants!