When you rule in a culture of fear, you're not getting the best out of people.

The single most important thing you can do in business is to be yourself.

If you don't wake up with something in your stomach every day that makes you think, "I want to make this movie," it'll never get made.

My advice to everybody - never give up and have great resiliency. Don't take the rejection personally, but listen if it’s intelligent and make changes if they’re needed and then move forward.

Listen, be respectful of others' opinions, be willing to change your mind - and then ultimately you have to make the decision. Decisiveness is very important.

There's a Harvard Business School thing that says, 'Every 10 years you should replant yourself,' and the only way to keep young is to learn new things and keep curious.

I felt, if I never did anything in my life but read scripts and synopsize them, I would be happy.

My mother, because of her life, had almost a contradictory way of viewing life. She had this great zest and joy for life and I think that I have that. The glass is always half full for me.

To me, education is the way out of poverty. And it is the only way.

If you don't wake up with something in your stomach every day that makes you think "I want to make this movie " it'll never get made.

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.

There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be here at all.

I wanted to talk about my life. There is so much. I was 18 when I made the record, and I had a lot to say.

So this idea of moving seemed like a good way to sort of represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade - so about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance

How can there be any progress of the country without the spread of education, the dawning of knowledge?

A golfer should never make a mental mistake because the ball is just sitting there waiting for you to hit it.

You could see the flames and the outer skin of the spacecraft glowing; and burning, baseball size chunks flying off behind us. It was an eerie feeling, like being a gnat inside a blowtorch flame.