Lee Daniels quotes:

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

I've had all types of beautiful girls tell me that they ugly when they look in the mirror, as if it's someone else's reflection they see.

I went from off-off Broadway. I would direct plays in Baldwin Hills. Almost Tyler Perry-like, really trying to express myself in that and not really knowing how to, knowing acting in story, but not really knowing how to technically hold a camera.

My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie.

Some of my friends don't have a cell phone. Patti LaBelle doesn't have a cell phone.

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

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.

While I am not a musician, I love music. I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. Everything from hard core rap to the soundtrack from the original 'Cinderella.'

Here's the thing: I think the media underestimates the intelligence of the moviegoer. We need to be fulfilled. People want to sit down and think, and I try to make people think.

People enjoy making fun of people who are famous; they love putting people down.

Empire' was a very traumatic experience for me. It was very schizophrenic, and it wasn't what I expected it to be.

I have a partner, Danny Strong; he's an incredible writer and, really, my backbone. So when we don't see eye to eye, it's painful.

I want to see movies I can walk away from and say, 'Wait, what happened there? Hold up, what did I just see? What?' and then it connects to something that you personally, unequivocally know to be truth.

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.

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.

Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.

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 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.

That's the gift 'Precious' has given me. You really think you're telling a story about a fat black girl, and only fat black girls will understand it, and then you realize we're all Precious.

Most actors want the audience to like them, and that leads to bad acting.

I think this last film I finished, 'The Butler,' is the closest I will come to as a work-for-hire.

I come from a family of domestics. I think most African-Americans of my age do. They were trusted by their bosses. I have met so many white people that spent more time with their nannies than they have with their own parents.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me.

I have a very clear vision, and I come from film, where director is God, so if there's a clash, it's painful.

My dad was a cop. My mom worked at various jobs - she worked as a homemaker, a bank teller, a bartender.

I think the father-son love story is a universal one which transcends color.

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

I don't know - I haven't seen any of my movies after I finish them. I leave the editing room; I don't go back.

I went to school at Radnor High School. And I went to a liberal arts college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Lindenwood College.

I don't read the reviews, the blogs, or anything else. Instead, I feel the audience when I show the film.

I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.

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.

Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

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

My kids tell me to Instagram, so I do that. I have a few thousand followers.

I embrace the criticism, because ultimately (it means) the masses have seen it [my movie]. I embrace it for my father's story, for my mother's story, for my auntie, for my grandmother, who all got their teeth knocked out so I could be [where I am].

I don't think anyone likes anything of mine. At the end of the day, I love it, but just because I love it... I happen to love broccoli, not a lot of people like broccoli. I always question if somebody else is going to love my films.

Being the first person to go to college that really related to me from the movie [The Butler] because being black and going to college everyone puts so much hope into you.

I worked at Warner Bros. for a while. I was the head of the minority talent casting. It was like pre-Spike Lee and post-blaxploitation era.

I want to go to places that are unexpected of me, because people really think they have me pegged. I want to do something different, like maybe do a space movie or a musical.

I think that, as African-Americans, oftentimes we have to put ourselves on pedestals as opposed to really looking at ourselves and trying to understand ourselves and become better people. We always have to be on pedestals.

I believe in life that you know that everything prepares you for the next thing - whether it's a hit, whether it's not a hit, whether it's a... your failures are your accomplishments because it makes you prepared for whatever it is that you are going to do next.

I look at my movies; I call my movies 'the kid.' It's like I'm giving birth. I'm in the cocoon, you know?

I started casting. I cast music videos, but I kept getting fired from jobs because I was iconoclastic in my ways of casting.

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.

I think it's very important that we don't sound like militants. Often what we do is we give a comment, and because it comes across with passion, then we're 'angry black people.'

I want to live in my truth. Tell me you don't like me, and I know it. But when you don't tell me, and you work behind my back, it's a lie, and I don't know how to fight that.

As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace.

I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm always searching for the truth in everything I do. I demand it from my writing partner and my crew, actors, and so hopefully, we're making people think.

It's hard for me to accept love. I wish I could lie to you and tell you that it's easy for me, but it's not.

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

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

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.

As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace. So, it's about adjusting to the pace. It's not meant for everybody.

I can't do movies where you start thinking "Where's the commercial appeal? How are we going to market this?" It's not that kind of party.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

I don't work with fear, and I don't work with actors that are fearful.

I felt hopeful for the future because Obama is here. But nothing has changed. It's time for young kids to get serious again and really think about what their four fathers were like. As African-Americans, we are resilient, we are some bad mf-ers, and we are survivors. So get those i-pods out of their ears and become heroes again like the Freedom Riders.

I grew up hardcore. I learned to be more responsible - and fiscally responsible - you know, I just wanna be a kid again! Do a musical, have tons of time or something.

I like all my work equally. I look at the projects as children. I look at the experience more than the end result.

I think people in the future will come up to me and say, "Everything that you are and everything that you have is because of that butler [film]." Of course, that's Oprah's line from the movie, but I think it will resonate with my legacy with the movie.

I think that when you have audacity, you will get polarization.

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.

I'm not tough when it comes to people criticizing the people that I protect, and those are the actors. It makes them scared to do it again for another director.

I've dodged all sorts of bullets in Hollywood to get my movies made. I'm tough.

My dream is to make a Superman hero that's gay.

My philosophy has always been, you don't put your name in front of a movie.

Trust is hard to get from actors, and for me to give to actors.