I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‘We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.’
Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.
Hard work and determination equals success. Nothing comes easy. Put your mind to something.
I think death is not simply the last few moments of life, death is something that runs throughout the whole of life. Each of our moments is not only the possibility of affirmation, but it’s also we’re saying farewell at each moment to something.
I just don’t believe people can tame animals.
I would spend absolutely every last minute with my kids, telling them how much I love them and how much I would do for them.
Every relationship should eventually become a long-term relationship. Any director that I meet now isn’t just a director. He’s potentially a friend, and someone I can call to do a project that I want or that I have. That’s what I mean when I say branding and developing yourself, as a business.
Winners are the ones who want the most out of their opportunities.
I only wanna go up the steps toward a different level of stardom. The BET Awards was one of those steps, the VMAs was another huge step. And the next step, eventually, hopefully, would be the Oscars.
The most important thing for a director is being able to communicate. When you communicate comfortably, regardless of what you’re saying, it can always be processed.
My rule is to save myself first.
When you work hard and you treat people great, regardless of what it is that you’re doing, naturally people want to help and do things.
Some sarcasm is best told simply. Some humor is best told big and some is best told small.
Some people come to work and that’s exactly what it is – work.
I like the fact that now my understanding for entertainment and the entertainment business is completely different from what it was when I first came in. I get the business side of it.
I know how I get hard. Running on a treadmill behind women in a gym normally does it for me.
What you find I think in the mystical strain of Catholicism is that you’re put in relationship with God, and you have many opportunities not only of talking with God in petitionary prayer, but also of listening to God, being attentive to God, as happens in contemplation.
Every poem that I write is, in a sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my entire life turns.
The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.
I want to be funny, but it has to be a believable funny.
I wanna produce, write, and direct my own projects, and eventually fund them. I wanna be a mogul.