Quotes on Could

To win Best Director at Sundance was beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. It's still an incredible feeling to know I won. But as happy as I am about winning, I also know many other women of color have directed amazing films over the years that were equally deserving and didn't win.

No one could have been nicer, classier nor better looking than Dick Clark. I've had a crush on him since I was a teenager.

I like to read, even though it was really tough, because I could go anywhere in the world in a book, and I could have so many adventures in a book.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

There are vivid memories from my childhood - what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose, if I wanted to be fair, I could say that I'm trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers.

Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.

I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.

I'm really glad we came up when we did. When we got started, the record companies were concerned with building careers. They made sure you could put on a live show before you put a record out. And if your first album sold 100,000 to 200,000 copies, they were happy, because they figured you had your foot in the door on a way to a long career.

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

I knew hundreds and hundreds of women like me, who had traveled in and out of prison in a revolving door. They needed support and help just like I had received. And it could make a difference, just like it had made a difference in my life. I wanted to see them come back to the community and have a chance at a different life, too.

If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.

Could I anticipate the enmity of those for whom I encountered such opposition? If they had been willing, I should have gained the victory. But the head faints when it is abandoned by the other members. If they had been wise they would have seen that in attacking me they were attacking their own privileges and serving princes to their own servitude.

Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.

It dawned on me that comics were not an intrinsically limited medium. There was a tremendous amount of things you could do in comics that you couldn't do in other art forms - but no one was doing it. I figured if I'd make a try at it, I'd at least be a footnote in history.

We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.

Your destination might not end up being exactly what you envisioned to start with, but if you stick it out and work through the challenges, what you end up with will be far better than you could have ever imagined.

Let your mind see every detail of your own special version of the very best that life can be. If you could make the world exactly to your liking, consider very specifically just how that world would be. If you could spend your time doing precisely what you wish, how would the moments of your life be lived?

Age is just a number. Life and aging are the greatest gifts that we could possibly ever have.

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.

Every time I hear a recording I've made, I hear all kinds of things I could improve or things I should have done. There's always so much more to be done in music. It's so vast.