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.

I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.

If you're a creative person, you'd better not read what people write about you, because if it's good it'll blow your head up and it'll force you not to take the subway and you'll start taking cabs, and you'd better stay around people, and if it's bad, it just hurts your feelings so much it discourages you.

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.

God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."