101 Quotes by Dee Rees

You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look.

I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.

With friendship, it's hard sometimes - you don't outgrow your friends, but you do question how people are friends to you in different ways and how it's okay to cultivate other relationships outside of that.

In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about.

I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.

I was interested with exploring the idea of who gets to be in possession of the land - how it's sometimes impossible to go back home, how family can be the thing that drags you down.

You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.

I'd go to lesbian parties. I felt like I wasn't hard enough to be butch, but I wasn't wearing heels and a skirt - I wasn't femme - so I felt like I was sort of invisible.

There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.