It's so easy today to get swept up in celebrity fixation and materialism and searching for some validation outside of yourself when we know it's really found within and through meaningful connections with other people.

'Precious' is strangely uplifting. It goes down into the valley but it also goes to the mountain tops. A lot of difficult realities are explored in 'Precious,' but the peaks make the valleys and the valleys make the peaks.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

I love so many different genres. I love crime films - and unusual coming-of-age pieces.

I think if you get your fifth script made, that's the fast track. But there's no guarantee any of them will get made.

I think there are many more stories still to be told about women.

I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.

If you do the math, films featuring women are a good investment.

It's always healthy to be taken down a notch, even though it's humbling.

My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.

My M.F.A was in directing, and all the films I've made, for film school and after, I've written, directed and shot.

My mother enjoyed few things more than investing in the underdogs and showing them that they were special and could achieve their dreams.

The brutality that can take place in a crime film heightens the tenderness that can also be there.

There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.

There is so much talent out there and not quite as much opportunity.

Women have a greater verbal capacity.