You have to examine a scene on the page first. Then you get into the basics of acting: Who are you? Who are you talking to? How do you feel about that person?

Failure: Is it a limitation? Bad timing? It's a lot of things. It's something you can't be afraid of, because you'll stop growing. The next step beyond failure could be your biggest success in life.

In places in the world where we don't speak the same language, or even understand that we pray to the same God, we dance to the same beat, that is the ONE.

But out of limitations comes creativity.

Be true. Be beautiful. Be free. In the midst of segregation and racism Mamma raised us to be independent and free. We saw ourselves as citizens of the world, not of a block.

I'm driven by passion. I mean, I am tired right now. I work to a point of abandon. I am fueled by my understanding of the need for self-expression that exists for young people.

Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.

If you just change one person's life, you feel like you've done something. But if you can change a whole lot of them and get them looking at themselves differently, it's amazing.

I'm always moving forward.

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

I think a good director casts a film so that the actors bring a lot to the table.

He who has the audacity to stop you from dreaming is he who had given you the imaginations to think, but not those who watch you as you explore the dreams!

She disliked me. But she worshipped my brother. He didn't see her, not really. Not like I did.

All the power in the world, resides inside you.If you let it.

People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.

I will lead mankind into a new world! You cannot kill me! No man can murder me!

A dream is a feeling that sticks - and propels.

Once a blooming red rose, full of streaming life in its veins. Now a wilting black petal rupturing with death and pain.

It's true that I did get the girl, but then my grandfather always said, Even a blind chicken finds a few grains of corn now and then.