“My family was very supportive of my acting.”

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It paid my way through college and helped my family out.

You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.

I think that I have sold out sometimes.

I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.

I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I’m ninety, and they won’t need to paste my face with make-up.

I just want to keep acting and better my craft and see how far it goes.

They say an actor is only as good as his parts. Well, my parts have done me pretty well, darling.

I had heard about how people struggle and how hard it is to get into acting. But I did not care because it’s something I love.

I think we need to get back to truth-based news. It won’t be easy, but we better do it because otherwise we’re not acting on information.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self… When acting, you’re someone else.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

My first inspiration for acting came from the first episode of ‘Hannah Montana.’ That’s when I knew I wanted to be a singer and an actress.