Lee Daniels

“I'm always workin', man. I gotta pay the light bills.”

“I wanted to make a black 'Dynasty.'”

“When I make movies, I don't ever go out there to please anyone other than myself. I never try to make a film for the masses. I just try to tell my story.”

“I'm still pulled over... We were nominated for two Oscars for 'Monster's Ball,' and I almost didn't make the Oscars because I got pulled over in Beverly Hills.”

“I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.”

“I moved on to a nursing agency as a receptionist just to get a job, and ended up managing it, which led to me opening my own - say your mom is sick and needs someone to help her, then you call something like what I had: a home health agency.”

“When you're paying everybody nothing, I mean, they have homes to pay for. And my movies are like putting on theater. Nicole Kidman is at craft services, and John Cusack is moving furniture; there are no egos. The only ego is the story.”

“I want to learn. I want to stretch my muscles as a director and work under different circumstances.”

“I'm in a great place because I trust people behind the camera as I go off, and I still go back to my day job and do film.”

“To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture. We're making a movie. We're making it like we're putting on a play.”

“My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.”

“I'm not really vegan. I'm vegan-ish. I have a piece of lamb every now and then.”

“'Precious' is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I'm prejudiced. I'm prejudiced against people who are darker than me.”

“I love black women. I live for them. They are everything to me. I'm obsessed with them. They are sophisticated, resilient and smarter than me.”

“I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave.”

“When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.”

“I love actors, and I'm very protective of them. I trust them. It's a mutual trust.”

“I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.”

“My work is therapeutic: 'Monster's Ball,' 'Woodsman' and 'Shadowboxer,' because I don't go to therapy, and I sort of live life through my films.”

“Putting on a movie is like going to war - for me, at least. It's all about time; time is money, and we don't have it. So it's all about getting to know each other intimately quickly. You are with family members that you like or don't like, but you can't leave them because you're stuck with them.”