Spike Lee Quotes

I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen. A lot of times, an opportunity might fall into your lap, but you have to be ready for that opportunity. You can’t sit there waiting on it. A lot of times you are going to have to get out there and make it happen.

You gotta make your own way. You gotta find a way. You gotta get it done. It's hard. It's tough. That's what I tell my students every day in class. I've been very fortunate. Some people might call me a hardhead, but I'm not going to let other people dictate to me who I should be or the stories I should tell. That doesn't register with me.

There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic.

I think black people have to be in control of their own image because film is a powerful medium. We can't just sit back and let other people define our existence.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten.

It gets dangerous when you start allowing people to validate your work.

Don't think that because you haven't heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.

When you love something it's not a job anymore.

When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.

All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.

We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal.

Power is knowing your past.

I think people who have faults are a lot more interesting than people who are perfect.

I ain't Martin Luther King. I don't need a dream. I have a plan.

I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

Those that'll tell don't know, and those that know won't tell.

I don't think my films are going to get rid of racism or prejudice. I think the best thing my films can do is provoke discussion.

There's a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we've arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.

As a people we do not need anyone else's stamp of approval.

I don't think racism can be eliminated in my lifetime ... or my children's or grandchildren's. But I think it's something we have to strive for. I'm going to keep working toward that day coming.

Making films has got to be one of the hardest endeavors known to humankind.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

I like to work with the same people when I can, and you want to get people with the same interests that you have, and the same aesthetic.

It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.

You have to do the research. If you don't know about something, then you ask the right people who do.

I wouldn't be doing motherfu**ing films for almost three decades if every time I did something that someone didn't like I went in a fu**ing cocoon and just hid there and didn't make my art.

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 at the rate going on now. We'd not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.

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

Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith.

I don't get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. 'Oldboy' we shot Two Pro 35mm. For 'Da Blood of Jesus,' we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It's a 4K camera.

Critics like to build you up, tear you down, and then, if you're lucky, build you up again.

If you can't take a hit, you're not going to last long, that's for sure.

I'm very careful about how I portray violence in my films. I do believe that violence, especially violent video games, are not a good thing for young kids.

America doesn't have the moral right to tell other people what to do. To say the whole world has to fall into line is you-know-what. I hope more people will rise up.

Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.

A lot of times, we censor ourselves before the censor even gets there.

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.

I mean, I think there's a lot of hope in my work. I don't think I'm a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films. Some more than others, but there's definitely... I think we want to convey the feeling of hope with the montage at the end.

Violence is a part of America. I don't want to single out rap music. Let's be honest. America's the most violent country in the history of the world, that's just the way it is. We're all affected by it.

I really don't deal with hypotheticals.

A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.

Since the days of slavery, if you were a good singer or dancer, it was your job to perform for the master after dinner.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.

Our greatness, our talent has never been the question. It's been a matter of grappling for control over what we do.

It is really important that young people find something that they want to do and pursue it with passion. I'm very passionate about filmmaking. It's what I love to do.