I had very supportive parents that made the way for me even at a time when there were very few women - no women really maybe two or three women - and very few fewer than that African-American women heading in this direction so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.

Stupidity outrage vanity cruelty iniquity bad faith falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.

I've always thought that as long as directors and casting directors don't see me as just Harry Potter I'll be OK. People have shown a lot of faith in me and I owe them a huge debt. They're letting me prove that I'm serious about this.

The keys to patience are acceptance and faith. Accept things as they are and look realistically at the world around you. Have faith in yourself and in the direction you have chosen.

My film directorial career has been nothing but repetition of one failure after another!

Directly after the show people might have responded better to it but who really knows. It did what it did and while it seems like a failure to most but it was a success for me and has given me so many opportunities.

A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.

My failure during the first five or six years of my art training to get set in the right direction and the disappointment which it caused me drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success court failure.

Whether in success or in failure I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Music and language are a vital element. We as actors and directors offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Directing is a more pragmatic experience where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and if I'm upset I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web and should do what they can do better which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

I like directors who have worked as actors. They know the experience.

Some of us are interested in directors but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

If you've got a piece and you can feel the person who's going to direct it is really made for it if it's really special for them then it's going to be a better-than-usual experience.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe our perception of it so right our only universe is perception.