Lee Daniels Quotes

I first watched 'Adhe Adhure' in college. I loved it, and it stayed with me ever since. I decided that I would some day direct this play - not in English, but in Hindi.

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

When I was three, I lived in Florida, and my mom took me to see the touring production of 'Cats.' And I was, like, absolutely silent - which for a 3-year-old never happens - and I turned to her and said, 'I need to do this.' That's when I started my performer journey.

I grew up with 2 older brothers, the oldest of which was big into film. Hanging around him got me seeing so much good stuff at an early age. Maybe a 10-year-old should not be watching 'Boyz N the Hood' like 10 times in a row? I don't know. But it probably shaped me in some way.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Edgar Allen Poe really started me when I was 8. I fell in love with everything of his.

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.

Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a doctor. The doctors I knew as a very young child must have helped to plant the desire in me, when I was as young as five or six. One homeopathic physician, Dr. Justice Gage Wright, was a great model.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

That earliest shock in one's life which occurs to all of us; which first makes us think.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

One of my favorite books [The Stand] of all time. I grew up reading it.

Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now ... !

Literature usually begets literature.

Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.