Women like men should try to do the impossible. And when they fail their failure should be a challenge to others.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

Although we have in theory abolished human slavery recognized women's rights and stopped child labor we continue to enslave other species who if we simply pay attention show quite clearly that they experience parental love pain and the desire for freedom just as we do.

I think women don't grow up with the harsh world of criticism that men grow up with we are more sensitively treated and when you first experience the world of film-making you have to develop a very tough skin.

I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.

My kids will grow up in a house knowing that it's perfectly normal for two men to be in love it's perfectly normal for two women to be in love. My kids will grow up knowing it's all about love. It doesn't matter who you're with and everyone should have that experience.

My father respected and admired my mother and was a person who was always standing by my side encouraging me to do more and believed in my capacity. So in that sense my own experience was very good in becoming an empowered woman. From early on I carried that strong message: 'You can do it.' So I never had any doubt that women can do a lot.

There's full consensus in the military that women shouldn't be in person-to-person combat. I don't know if we have enough experience to know whether this is the right approach. But women can be elsewhere. We have mandatory military service in Chile. I pushed for women in all areas.

Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable.

Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I think how pay gets determined is pretty broad - experience how people look what they bring to the job. But there's no question women are paid less. Women don't ask.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

You know it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope someday we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.

I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal or having any import to the world at large as opposed to men's work which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.

You can't leave out half the world's experience and expect to address all the problems. Women communicate differently and process information differently which leads them to resolve conflicts differently.