I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish.

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.

When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.

You can't be hesitant about who you are.

Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.

I don’t want anyone putting any limits on me.

I don't have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn't love me has to say about me.

All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn't have to be huge and humongous.

She asks me how my heart is, and I say, 'beating.'That's never the answer you want, and I am sorry about that.

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

There are no college courses to build up self-esteem or high school or elementary school. If you don't get those values at a early age, nurtured in your home, you don't get them.

History is full of surprises.

America in some ways is much more of a democracy then France. It is and it's not.

I shall make it the most agreeable part of my duty to study merit, and reward the brave and deserving.

Just because I didn't do what you told me, doesn't mean I wasn't listening to you!

Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.

But I don't have such a strong desire to need to get away from filmmaking.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.