My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name.

I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.

I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another.

In America, it is difficult to be your own man.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.