Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

When we are angry or depressed in our creativity we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth and then we are angry at being undervalued.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Generally I'm a pretty positive but like any other working person if the jobs aren't coming in I do get depressed.

As a black woman my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

Certainly protecting oppressed people stopping ethnic conflict and promoting responsible governance are worthy goals. But none is as important for American security and prosperity as keeping the peace in the Middle East Europe and East Asia.

Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.

Nevertheless the passions whether violent or not should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust and music even in situations of the greatest horror should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it and thereby always remain music.

Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

When I got depressed I watched Bruce Lee movies. I learned everything from Bruce Lee.