I left 'Fast and Furious' because I just felt like, at a certain point, after number six, there wasn't another story that I wanted to tell.

They never complained, that's what I love about my parents and it's something that inspired me.

My brothers and I would try to talk our dad into letting us stay up and watch 'Star Trek.' I remember watching it and feeling that a family is not just by blood, a family is a shared experience and that really stuck with me.

As a filmmaker, if you want to write a script, all you need is some paper and a pen or a computer, that's it.

If you watch 'Fast and Furious 6,' you do see that it's a culmination of something and I think it's the end of a chapter.

I always found it interesting when you went off to college, people would talk about how you go and search for your own identity. A lot of suburban middle-class kids would be shopping for identities and they would co-opt identities from other cultures.

Every time you try to do something different, you have to expect obstacles.

Studio films are driven by marketing. The currency is literally money. But in the indie world, the currency is passion.

I'm so sick of independent films being co-opted by Hollywood. You're making a project that's small, really personal, and the first thing anyone asks in any meeting is, 'Who's in it?' I'm like, 'Are you kidding?'

Space is a big place.

I get that a lot of people love 'Star Wars' - and I could see that you can love both and they can coexist in our lives. But the DNA of 'Star Trek' is different in as far as it's human beings, it's us in the future.

Growing up as an Asian American, we're lucky to have two sentences in a history book about the Chinese-American experience.

Star Trek' is not just about literal exploration, but also the exploration of ourselves.

As a society, we're not perfect by any means.

At the end of the day, if you're living by fear, you're gonna get screwed in Hollywood.

You hear nightmare stories from young filmmakers working in Hollywood, being told what to do.

After 'Furious 6,' that was a natural break for me. It was a good time to step away.

I grew up in the working class suburbs in the 80s so I do love Hollywood movies but what I don't like is when they take something that's successful and they recycle it.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor - whether that's being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

I remember the first time that I realized that being black meant that I wasn't allowed certain things. It was in the fourth grade, and it was who I thought was my best friend not inviting me to his birthday party because I would be the only black kid there. It was the first time I ever felt restricted, and it certainly wasn't the last time.

If I just wanted to put clean, perfect images of black people on the screen for an hour and a half, first of all, there are other people already doing that, and they're making a lot of money doing it.

You know what, man, that's part and parcel of being a black person in this country: everything's harder. It just is.

I loved Lena Dunham's 'Girls.'

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

It occurred to me that by naming the film itself 'Dear White People,' I could tap into the burgeoning meme culture as well as make a meta-commentary about the controversies within the film.

In the press, there's this desire for the black audience to be this monolithic thing that always responds to the same stars. That's a really reductive way of looking at the black audience.

I talk about being a 'what' to people. Like, being gay in mainstream society is a different kind of 'what' than being black. They don't always jive. It's confusing and leads to these really awkward personal stories that have just been in me for awhile.

There are a plethora of ways of being black, just like there's many ways to being white.

As much as I'd love to believe that we are 'post-racial' - an idea that really gained traction after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - I can never escape the fact that in the world I am perceived as a 'black man' and, in certain parts of the world, as a 'black gay man.'

The downside of doing a multi-protagonist movie is that you don't get to service each character as you would if they were the central protagonist of the movie.

I never quite lived up to the image of the black man as I saw it growing up. I was never listening to the right music at the right time or wearing the right clothes at the right time. I was still listening to Michael Jackson, and everyone had sort of moved on to gangster rap. Alanis Morissette when everyone else was listening to En Vogue.

Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

I think we all have identity crises throughout our lives.

I think art is much more valuable when it's honest. If it's not honest, it's just propaganda.

I want to make movies in every genre.

I have different privileges because I am a man, and I have to acknowledge that and realize that another person of color who is also a woman is having a different experience than I am.

To surrender your ego, you have to have one first.

There is an obsession with black tragedy. If you see a black movie, it's typically historical, and it tends to deal with our pain. And listen, there have been some excellent films made in that vein, and there are some painful parts of black history that should be explored, but it is kind of weird that only those films bubble up to the surface.

Self-doubt is a constant companion for a chubby, gay, black boy born in the South.

Any time a black person has the audacity to tell everybody else that they're also human beings, they are confronted with all kinds of malice and violence and ill will. It's been that way since black people were brought to this country.

I see racism as institutional: the rules are different for me because I'm black. It's not necessarily someone's specific attitude against me; it's just the fact that I, as a black man, have a much harder time making an art-house movie and getting it released than a white person does about their very white point of view. That's racism.

I often have to play a role to get what I want in my life. At the same time, I can't do that without also nourishing who I really am and being aware of my true self and the ways in which I'm not bound by my race or sexual orientation or class or country or whatever.

Daring to make films of any kind and thus invite the possibility of ridicule was an internal battle of mine for many years as I worked on the screenplay for what would become 'Dear White People' beginning at the end of George W. Bush's second term.

'Color-blind' comes up - people say 'Oh, I'm color-blind and therefore can't be accused of racism,' but I think that if we are going to have an honest dialogue about racism, we have to admit that people of color are having a different experience.

Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year.

Everyone at a performing arts schools is weird. The weirder you were, the better. If you weren't weird in some way, they'd look at you and be like, 'Who's that square?'

There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That's how 'Star Wars' happened.

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the 'Dear White People' lens.

Here's the thing: I come from a filmmaking background, so this concept of sort of overseeing a television show but not directing was, in general, not weird, but I had to get used to what that felt like. My initial instinct was, 'I want to direct as much of this as possible.' But the logistics of making of TV, that's just not possible.