I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morris College in Atlanta, Georgia.

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.

Sometimes crisis triggers the genius within

If you want to be, if you want to see, let us read a lot, then we will have a shot!

When we love the stars light up, the wrong becomes undone. Naturally, my soul surrenders.

Nothing more isolating than a mental illness.

I like the freedom of being able to just use the live show as an opportunity to more so deconstruct what's going on in the album than to recreate it.

Why haven't we, with all our cunning, experience, resolved this problem of fear completely? Isn't fear the cause of the 'me'?

It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

When the student is ready, the messenger appears.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

Events tend to recur in cycles.