It's very nourishing and collaborative - kind of the true essence of what one would want an artistic collaboration to be [the collaboration with Oprah Winfrey].

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.

If you can remember why you started, then you will know why you must continue.

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

If I don't eat right when I wake up, I die.

I wouldn't say I was a rebel as such, but I certainly wasn't right at school.

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

I'm used to my films having little effect on making the world a better place.

I've won many awards and I want more. If you want to call it hunger then I'm hungry for awards.