“One of the photographers was like, “Can you stop talking and try to look sexy for a minute?””

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it’s as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

My bathroom is filled with hair and makeup stuff and I play with it all the time. What the real lesson is, is that you can own your own sense of beauty. It doesn’t have to be something you get from somewhere else.

[Black-ish creator] Kenya Bariss wrote on Girlfriends. We’ve been friendly since then. He sent me [the pilot] and said, “I wrote it for you.” But I know what that means in this industry.

I have to take some time to dream some new dreams. I feel like there’s a treasure hunt in front of me. A treasure hunt that is speckled with and seeded by a deep-rooted wild freedom.

Why am I beating my hair up? Because I want it to look like something that it isn’t? These are questions that I’ve been pondering my whole life.

Wisdom means to choose now what will make sense later.

I want to be awake. I want to choose kindness, live & let live. I want joy, gratitude, and peace today.

I think television is doing a better job than films in terms of representing people, but television is still not diverse.

My mom didn’t adhere to any of those typical rules. She woke us up for school every morning, and was there at dinner or would call at bedtime. She never left for longer than a week. She recorded while we were sleeping.

If I’m going to show cleavage or chest then I don’t show leg. I show one thing. If I show leg then everything else is covered up.

In some of the darkest and hardest moments, there is always a part of me that is okay. And I can always access that part of me.

It would drive the photographers crazy because I would giggle and tell jokes. I was gregarious, and looking back, I realize I had a captive audience.

Somehow [Kenya Bariss] has figured out how to explore these very weighty, sticky, sharp topics, and still be funny and not make fun of the topic.

I’m a really big believer in self care. One of the ways I nourish my soul is I eat the way I live my life – joyfully.

Black-ish is really a show about an American family and these are some of the topics that come up – for all of us, in different ways – and we get to see how this family is walking through it.

I was shy, but it came out in a big personality. My turning point was when I let my hair go naturally and I got contact lenses. I am really blind, by the way. I have these big eyes that don’t work!

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

One cannot resist the lure of Africa.

Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

You don’t have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten.

One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.

For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.