“The choices of roles I made had to do with educating and entertaining. And as a result I found myself working only every two or three years.”

I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.

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

The gratification comes, for me, in the doing of it. And once I’ve done it, I can’t do anything about it if it’s good or if it’s bad.

I didn’t want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us – I was the middle child – and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don’t want anybody to walk ahead of me, and I don’t want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that’s how I feel about equal rights.

You never know what motivates you.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there’s nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

In my early years, there were a number of experiences that made me decide I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were a number of issues I wanted to address. And I wanted to use my career as a platform.

Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here.

Now, I am perfectly willing to just enjoy my career by choosing roles simply because I consider them to be a challenge and doing the best possible job I can.

My mother was an introvert and quite religious. And we were brought up in the church. And when she learned that I wanted to act, she simply said: ‘You cannot live here and do that.’

When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can’t live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that’s the juice that kept me going.

How do you project a character if you don’t have a sense of where she is from? I’ve always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.

One lady told me that before she saw ‘Sounder’ she didn’t believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.

We have to support our own films. If we don’t, how can we expect others to support them?

I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.

Every day, each of us makes a multitude of choices that will impact our lives…the quality of our choices will dictate whether we will struggle in frustration or live an extraordinary life–the life of our dreams.

While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.

Choice is your greatest power. It is an even greater power than love, because you must first choose to be a loving person.

Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.

A fool is a person who knows the difference between right and wrong, and chooses to do wrong.

If you choose to forgive someone who has wronged you rather than to hate that person, you shift the frequency of your Light.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

Notice what happens when you choose to embrace rather than reject each feeling that arises within you today.