“I respect the audience's intelligence a lot, and that's why I don't try to go for the lowest common denominator.”

“If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they're killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women a...”

“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”

“A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there.”

“I think that anyone who lives in New York, who's lived here, who's spent any time here, knows that it's basically a love-hate relationship, you might say. Even though I still think it's the greates...”

“I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.”

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Joy is but the sign that creative emotion is fulfilling its purpose.”

“Everyone lives in two worlds, Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. Theres the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, th...”

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wi...”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its ...”