Quotes About Representation

I love women in suits.

This practice of skinny actresses donning fat suits is essentially the new and acceptable blackface in Hollywood.

'Suits' fans. I've never met a more diverse audience: across gender, race, class. It's incredible. People who are high-powered lawyers to doormen. A Chinese immigrant cable installer - who barely spoke English - loves 'Suits!'

I'm not trying to write raps for people in three-piece suits sitting behind big oak desks. I'm writing for people who can't speak for themselves and about things we see every day.

I spent summers in my room listening to cast albums, like 'Les Miserables,' every night. I knew it backwards and forwards. I want to be the first black Jean Valjean.

I realized with Broadway everything written for black people is usually written in the past, and I'm kind of a contemporary guy. I don't think you want to see me in 'Raisin in the Sun'.

Sundance is the only hand that feeds for women directors.

To win Best Director at Sundance was beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. It's still an incredible feeling to know I won. But as happy as I am about winning, I also know many other women of color have directed amazing films over the years that were equally deserving and didn't win.

There are a lot of duets happening, but very few songs which are sung by only one woman.

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on.

In a film, I can show you the beach, the sunset, the roads, while in a play you have to imagine all that.

It's time for grassroots citizens to have a president that's focused on them rather than the super PACs.

At the end of the day, it's not about starting a game in the NFL, winning a Super Bowl, or getting to the Hall of Fame. It's about representing yourself in a way that represents your faith.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

I wanted Luke Cage to very much be an African American superhero rather than a superhero that happens to be black. I felt it was important to give him that cultural grounding but also show that it doesn't make him an obtuse or one-sided character.

It is so important for girls and boys to have a female, strong superhero to look up to.

My dream role would be to play a Korean hero in a Hollywood superhero movie.

I created the first black superhero who was not a gangbanger or an African chief but was rather a college graduate and a professional, which I think is a big accomplishment.

Most superhero characters we see these days are from foreign countries. I would like to play a superhero that shows off Korean power.

Ah, I can hear you say, so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave! But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.

while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.