My cousin Malcolm Lee is also a filmmaker.

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.

‎"Based on a true story"? No, thanks. I prefer "based on a true imagination".

Relax in your own home, Kylie. It's one of the few places on earth you're free to be as you really are.

We hear voices in solitude we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life we receive counsels and comforts we get under no other condition.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

Sit, be still, and listen, because you're drunk and we're at the edge of the roof.

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

In some ways, America has grown up to be a masterpiece of self-concern.

People YouTube me and crap and then, they probably don't want to see me after seeing a friendly posted YouTube video, so I'm constantly having to take those down.