I like all my work equally. I look at the projects as children. I look at the experience more than the end result.

Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

I've dodged all sorts of bullets in Hollywood to get my movies made. I'm tough.

I can't do movies where you start thinking "Where's the commercial appeal? How are we going to market this?" It's not that kind of party.

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

I want to go to places that are unexpected of me, because people really think they have me pegged. I want to do something different, like maybe do a space movie or a musical.

Trust is hard to get from actors, and for me to give to actors.

I don't work with fear, and I don't work with actors that are fearful.

I'm not tough when it comes to people criticizing the people that I protect, and those are the actors. It makes them scared to do it again for another director.

My philosophy has always been, you don't put your name in front of a movie.

You don't need to have the whole world in your hands in order to live a very fulfilled life.

Love boldly.Love boundlessly.Love benevolently.Love blessedly.

Give and take makes good friends.

A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.

Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time. Some artists never see their work in front of an audience, so for them 15 years is a blink of an eye. I am nothing but grateful.

Once you reach what is / inside it is outside.

What that situation really needed was a little eyebrows.

And see the peaceful trees extend their myriad leaves in leisured dance- they bear the weight of sky and cloud upon the fountain of their veins.

We do not fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not subsequently converted; we fail only if we do not faithfully tell the gospel at all.