“The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace.”

They didn’t really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

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.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

There was one moment when I was in L.A., and he was teaching me a move. I just looked at him, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m being taught to wrestle by Dwayne Johnson. What the hell?’

I grew up in the inner city of Chicago, and then I moved to Robbins, and it kind of raised me.

If you look at it, the corset is a very beautiful item, but when I put one on, I realized how little you could actually move.

We went from apartment to apartment by ourselves. One of the best memories I had was when we moved into our first apartment, no bed, no furniture and we just sat in the living room and just hugged each other. We thought we made it.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

We move between two darknesses.