Coming from the '50s, things were very violent.

I believe that if we have to pay 100 percent for our college tuition, and then we get into the workplace, and we're only given 70 percent of our counterparts' salaries, then we shouldn't have to pay but 70 percent of our college tuition. Maybe that'll stop the bullshit.

The African-American community is not monolithic. It's liberal and conservative.

Struggle and survival, losing and winning, doesn't matter. It's entering the race that counts. You enter, you can win, you can lose .... but it's all about entering the race.

I never thought I was pretty. I couldn't even put on eyelashes or makeup.

Yes, you can have art films about the triumph of the human spirit and all of that, but you'll have it done with a big-budget icon with a $20 million salary. You'll have Julia Roberts, you'll have Robert Redford, you'll have Russell Crowe doing those films, because if they're going to cost $90 million, they're going to make that movie for a public that's very large and mainstream. They're not going to make it for three or four million black people.

I'm still trying to do films about black women.