Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions

I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

I have the capacity to express what I feel needs to be expressed. And I try to do what I believe in.

Art is about the dynamics of the human experience.

It's important for people of color to link up with issues around globalization, food security, health, the environment.

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical senseand are not easy to fool with laughter

If the light's not in you, you're in the dark.

Freedom is never given; it is won.

I won't do anything that is connected with drugs. I've seen drugs ruin so many people's lives. I don't think there's anything cute about drugs. And I don't believe in celebrating them.

Life is a train, get on board.

Yo, thats illogical I cant have it!

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter.

Filmmaking is a real craft.

I assure you that there's a lot involved in compositions with figures. ... It's like weaving... you must control and keep an eye on several things at once.