Ava DuVernay Quotes

• Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you're focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don't have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited. My way was to work, make my short... make my documentary... make my small films... use my own money... raise money myself... and stay shooting and focused on each project.

  Ava DuVernay

  Glasses, Use, Shooting

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• If your dream only includes you, it's too small.

  Ava DuVernay

  Dream, Your Dreams, Ifs

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• Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.

  Ava DuVernay

  Moving, Goal, Passionate

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• Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.

  Ava DuVernay

  Black, Want, Littles

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• We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

  Ava DuVernay

  Doors, Way, Permission

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• Don't wait for permission to do something creative.

  Ava DuVernay

  Creativity, Creative, Waiting

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• I did not have any problem with speaking up because my mother, my family, my grandmother, my aunt - I grew up in a family dominated by women - always encouraged me to do so. And if a girl is unafraid, then the world is her oyster.

  Ava DuVernay

  Girl, Mother, Aunt

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• As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.

  Ava DuVernay

  Art, Jobs, Black

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• There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It’s a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.

  Ava DuVernay

  Girl, Thinking, Reflection

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• Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.

  Ava DuVernay

  Needs, Stories, Figures

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• If you're doing something outside of dominant culture, there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.

  Ava DuVernay

  Culture, Easy, Do It Yourself

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• I've passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it's not happening to you; it's happening for you.

  Ava DuVernay

  Advice, Happenings

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• Folks can look at this issue and read it and it can feel like medicine, it can feel epidemic. We wanted this to hit people in their gut, and the hope is that by doing that, we can get more people to think more deeply about these issues.

  Ava DuVernay

  Thinking, Issues, Epidemics

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• If you have the ability to do something, you should do it.

  Ava DuVernay

  Should, Ability, Ifs

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• These are dark times for a lot of people who believe differently than our incoming administration [of Donald Trump], but there's also joy there, and there's also something in unifying around the things that we do believe in.

  Ava DuVernay

  Believe, Dark, People

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• All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

  Ava DuVernay

  Art, Block, Doors

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• Because my mom always told me that I could. From a very early age, I felt comfortable leading.

  Ava DuVernay

  Mom, Age, Felt

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• Usually, you have two people in a scene, and in the history of cinema the hero is most likely going to be the white guy. And the other guy is his friend who is carrying the bag or whatever, and you're not going to light for that guy.

  Ava DuVernay

  Hero, Two, White

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• When you're in your lane, there's no traffic.

  Ava DuVernay

  Lanes, Traffic

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• If your work is solid, it really doesn't matter what people you know because good work starts to rise to the top.

  Ava DuVernay

  People, Matter, Good Work

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• I make films about black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

  Ava DuVernay

  Mean, Men, White Man

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• [ Age Of Trump] was something that I really wanted to do, and I also really wanted it to feel evergreen, so we made a lot of attempts not to bog it down in the campaign fight, even though we were right in the middle of that. I wanted it to be something that could live on and be a conversation piece long after this inauguration, whoever it was going to be.

  Ava DuVernay

  Fighting, Long, Age

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• Stop asking, start doing.

  Ava DuVernay

  Asking

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• I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

  Ava DuVernay

  Narrative, Admire, Ifs

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• We're a new world and it's not pretty. It's going to be for the brave to figure out how to survive in this.

  Ava DuVernay

  Brave, World, Figures

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