Quotes About Diversity

You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know. But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else's shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.

Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.

We know there needs to be diversity in storytellers telling their own stories. I think there's a beautiful forward movement in that direction with McQueen telling '12 Years A Slave,' with Coogler telling 'Fruitvale,' and with Daniels telling 'The Butler.'

I think all Latino actors want to be storytellers first. I want to be an actor first, and then I want to be Latina.

I learned from the best storytellers in the world: Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Ne-Yo, Michael Jordan, Vin Diesel, RuPaul.

We have privilege in our hands as storytellers. We need to tell stories that reflect our world.

I formed this thing called the Half Foundation, and what I tried to do is quantify hiring practices in Hollywood. Half the population is women, so half of the storytellers should be women. Fifty percent of all the directors in my company are women, and it will forever be that way.

It's time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.

When I think about the shows that we have on our air, we've been known for a long time for shows that feature strong, dynamic, powerful women at their forefront. And we're going to continue with that kind of storytelling.

Through our Building Bridges dialogues at Accenture, where we have brought together people from diverse backgrounds to have sometimes difficult conversations, such as around race, I have experienced the power of storytelling to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other.

Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians.

I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if one company was able to seize a 40-50-60% share in storytelling. I don't think monopoly market shares are good for society, and I think they'd be particularly bad for society and storytellers if they were achieved in the storytelling genre.

When we talk about LGBT characters on TV we're talking about the entire rainbow, and that includes trans people, and that includes non-binary people, people of color, women, differently-abled people. There is so much opportunity for storytelling there, and I hope that we continue to see more of that.

In 21st-century storytelling all bets are off: anybody can do anything. We're all storytellers.

We've made so much headway with storytelling - mostly on cable, let's be honest - but also on the networks and, you know, I think it's about time that the leads are women. I'm not a woman, so I'm a bit biased - I wouldn't mind if a few roles were left over for men.

For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.

I was lucky enough to see the original cast of 'In the Heights.' This one blew my mind. The infusion of Latin, hip hop and rap with musical theatre, great storytelling and talent was a powerful combination to me during a time when I'd not been moved by much!

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.

I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I'm a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I've been doing for almost 30 years.

I am a perfectly normal woman. If what we do is storytelling and represent people that we see all day and every day, well, we do not see supermodels all day and every day.

Non-studio entities can experiment with storytelling that might be too niche... for a studio.

I am really interested in storytelling in general - nothing is off-limits!

There's a lack of diversity amongst executives in the position of greenlighting a film who feel that their stories are being told. If there's a diversity at the executive level, then we'll have diversity of the storytelling process.

I'd say 50 on men is like 33 on women in Hollywood. The standards - it's just the way we do our storytelling. And I hope it will change, because I think it's dumb.