A Quote by Ruby Dee

Spike Lee made such a difference in terms of black filmmakers, the subtleties - those authors, those writers who write from love, and those who write from that lofty position of superiority.I felt he took aspects of the black experience in America and held it up for us to see. He tried to put it in perspective. He did put it in perspective in his unique way.
I'm not going to be one of those people who says, 'I'm a showrunner; I'm not a black showrunner.' I'm black when I go to sleep. I'm black when I wake up, period. It doesn't affect my perspective on everything, but at the same time, it's who I am, and I'm proud of it.
There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.
I'm the wife Spike Lee deserves. A white woman, which he says he would never be with, so let's get someone really white. I am Spike Lee's wife from Hell. I'm white and weird and I won't pay enough attention to him. If he does any more of those angry interviews, I'm going to write him and see if he wants the wife he deserves.
I've met Bob Dylan. We did one of those non-handshake handshakes. I was with all guys, and he shook hands with all of them, and then they said, 'And this is Kate,' and I put my hand out, and he didn't put his out. And then I took my hand away, and he put his out. It was one of those. We finally did shake. And then I fainted!
I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.
I speak from a black woman's perspective, and that's a specific perspective, but sometimes there are things I want to be understood by folks who may not have an entryway into that concept, so I have to think about how I can open the space to bring those people in. And that does require balance.
Obama sees the world in two ways: from the black perspective and from the white perspective. He was raised as a black man, whose culture he has self-consciously adopted. But he was reared largely by his white grandparents. He lived a kind of racially bipartisan experience, and he will be able to speak a language that resonates with both communities.
I didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
The real difference between those who want to write and those that do, is that those that do get up every day and do it.
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
The difference between those who fail to achieve their goals in life and those who succeed is the difference between those who cannot put themselves in a supportive state and those who can consistently put themselves in a state that supports them in their achievements.
So many people - DPs, writers, and the assistants that go on to be directors and writers - come from the School of Spike Lee. He's almost set up an Institution of Spike Lee.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!