Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you've written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that's actually real.
Some of the subject matters that I like to make stories about are definitely not inherently commercial. So I have to look for a very special kind of financing and go down a very gentle path in order to make my films, as do basically all social-realist filmmakers. It's a long process.
It's a long road of paying your dues. Each and every person that's in this business has to go down that road. Some people may not have to. Some people may be given that road instantly because of who they are.
I'm really working hard at regaining Mannie Fresh as a household name. But for me, it's always been the long road. What the long road means is if I gotta go city to city, town to town or whatever it is, that's what I gotta do.
If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.
I had to let my ego go a long time ago.
We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.
You're not dead at 85. You're a long way from it. Go out and enjoy. You've earned it.
I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
Unless you have a long-running series, most actors just go job to job if you're lucky to keep working. You just do a movie or a play or a TV thing, and it's over at some point.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
It is not possible to go forward while looking back.
Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
I spent some time studying Toyota, because how could a loom maker - they made looms. That was their business for 50 years, 35 years - and then they decided to go into the car business after everyone else was in the car business.
This debt crisis coming to our country. The wall and tidal wave of debt that is befalling our nation. Medicare and Social Security go bankrupt within ten years, we have a debt that is looming so high that in the last year of President Obama's budget just the interest payments on our debt is $916 billion dollars.
I could go away five or six weeks in a row and never touch a club. I would just look at them and say, 'I just don't want to; it's not that important.' And it wasn't that important. Golf - I don't want to answer loosely - I pay a lot of attention to it, but I don't ever really think about it.
Forget: Refuse to dwell; let go and loosen one's hold, particularly on memory. To forget is an active - not passive - endeavor.
