“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.”

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.

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.

My gratification in working comes from the preparation and the building of the character.

I don’t think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don’t believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

You want to be a millionaire. But your values system says you believe in sleep more than grinding!

Sacrifice. Work. Self-discipline. I teach these things, and my boys don’t forget them when they leave.

Faith is not believing in my own unshakable belief. Faith is believing an unshakable God when everything in me trembles and quakes.

Why do we hold onto negativity? For some reason, we believe that others are affected by our experience of remaining upset, hurt or angry. Holding on to pain, anger, guilt or shame is the glue that binds us to the situation we want to escape.

I believe that we’re as happy in life as we make up our minds to be.

The first time you quit, it’s hard. The second time, it gets easier. The third time, you don’t even have to think about it.

I do believe in love at first sight. I’m experiencing it everyday.