The thing that I do is that when I fail, I just keep quiet about it. I just let it go. It’s done. I just go to the next thing. I don’t complain, I don’t go to – I pick my battles very, very judiciously, and I just assume that there’s good in the heart of everybody.
My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.
Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.
Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
Until you expose the cancer, you can’t fix it.
The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don’t want to touch.
It’s the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller – writer, musician, filmmaker.
I’m one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don’t have that. They don’t have that opportunity, they don’t have that.
When you’re interviewing someone, even your mother – you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what’s the best way to get the information from that person.
But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That’s what counts.
Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.
The black church will accept anybody.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he’s a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he’s a novel.
My family is my career.
People don’t realize you’re blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it’s got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I’m home.
As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
If you’re going to cheat and take people’s history and you’re not writing the Bible, you ain’t really so great. But if you try to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt too many people, then you probably can get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror.
Be kind to the living.
I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.
I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like ‘St. Anna’ is trying to raise.