Adam Rayner Quotes

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.

I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

I want to be part of the storytelling that educates people and awakens a sense of compassion in other people of the kind of people they don't encounter in their daily lives very frequently.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

Everybody asks, 'What does 'Humans of New York' mean?' and I always say that I try to avoid putting any kind of message in the work even if it is a positive or optimistic message. The moment you do that, you're looking for certain people and words that fit into the world view you are trying to show, and it becomes preachy.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

That's what was so amazing about 'Mulan.' Here is this story with all Chinese characters, and yet so many people related to her character and loved the story. So I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people, it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is.

Audiences want to feel represented, want to be able to empathize with the characters and the stories they are seeing on the screen.

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

What does it serve any studio to not reflect the lives of people who are giving you money, who are crying out to you, 'Hey, please tell our stories.'

It is very, very important that people understand that you can tell different kinds of stories, and they do, related to gay and lesbian issues - especially when you know the people behind them.

Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

When I made 'Monster,' I didn't think about it being about a woman. I didn't think about that she was a lesbian. I was telling a story about a specific person who was tragic and looking for love in the world, and the more I could make her you, the more of a victory.

Everyone's story matters.

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

Whenever an actor was going to die, I tried to help them understand not to take it personally. It wasn't about them. It's the story.

So many of us are hungry for stories with more racial diversity, more truth in representation, and I am anxious to help tell those stories in the future.

When people sit across from people - gay, straight, whatever - and they talk, they find out that people they may have been demonizing for their lifetime aren't the demons we've expected them to be.

My favorite part is being engaged with somebody's story and life, and getting a laugh with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for or not, and being challenged by the immediacy of conversation.