Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.

I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and they got broken down into my body, and I sweated it out. It's not because I want to talk about 'issues.' For me, a novel is a way of seeing the world.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

I think you're always drawn to what you love, and I'm always really drawn to things that feel really real and really true to me. I love things that make me think of things in a way I hadn't, and I love looking at people in the world in a way that I hadn't. And sometimes big, huge stories do that for me, but I think I am drawn to smaller ones.

We've always written from personal experiences.

Honestly, I want to make more music for the women. I rather have a show full of girls, but I still gotta talk about what I be personally going through, what I've gone through, and what the homies go through.

If people leave the house wanting to see a comedian, they want to see someone speak out for themselves and share true stories from their life.

I'm just a normal guy and blue-collar historian, and people keep tuning in.

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.

Live life before making movies, because you cannot make films about life, without having lived one.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever - I rap about it.

I always want to tell the truth. It doesn't have to be a pretty truth, and it doesn't have to be a life-changing and life-threatening truth like 'Chi-Raq.' But I want to tell someone's truth in an effort to inspire people to see themselves reflected on the screen.

Film has to reflect the real world.

If there's something you want to say or talk about, then that's what rap is all about - talking about your own experience.

I think 'The Wood' was probably more concerned with the parts of Inglewood that aren't usually seen on film - the areas that were middle-class, or upper-middle-class - and that idea that these worlds do exist, and should be accepted as part of Inglewood itself.

Truly great performers reveal not only their characters but bring everything they know about the world with them. It's not just what's in the script but the story of everything you've done and of who you are. If you're Chaplin, you're the immigrant. No matter what he's doing, he's always the little guy trying to make his place in the world.

I prefer to do roles that I can relate to.

My films are personal-voice-driven films about human characters and the place we live. Technically, I'm an independent filmmaker.

A few things I've noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that's continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they're songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

I'm not a gifted storyteller, so I write what I know and hope that honesty resonates with other people's experiences.

Man, I live out 90 percent of my songs and the other 10 percent... once in a while, I'll put myself in someone else's shoes and try to go down that road.

I'm not interested in making 'black' movies. I'm interested in making movies that reflect reality as I perceive it.