I devoted myself to writing for years without representation or a promise of anything. And there were times when I felt quite down about my prospects.

My mother enjoyed few things more than investing in the underdogs and showing them that they were special and could achieve their dreams.

I think there are many more stories still to be told about women.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

If you do the math, films featuring women are a good investment.

It's always healthy to be taken down a notch, even though it's humbling.

My M.F.A was in directing, and all the films I've made, for film school and after, I've written, directed and shot.

The brutality that can take place in a crime film heightens the tenderness that can also be there.

There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

When you get older, it's not about what you did that you regret, it's what you didn't do.

Never rub another man's rhubarb.

Genius and great abilities are often wanting; sometimes, only opportunities. Some deserve praise for what they have done; others for what they would have done.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

People are complicated. Our behavior towards one another is strange. So I like opportunities to investigate that.

It is always better to imitate a successful man than to envy him.

So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion.