“The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.

They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.

I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.

a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.

At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.

It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.

Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.

You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.

He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.

I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.

I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere,

I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship.

What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.

Sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience, and I’ve always believed audiences are moved and excited by what they hear in my movies at least as much as by what they see.

As you well know, you just can’t believe everything you see and hear, can you?

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who disbelieve, no amount of proof is sufficient.

I believe that there’s something interesting about anyone and everyone – you just have to figure out what that something is.

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.

Ambition has to be joined with expectancy. A sense that you have a dream for yourself that you believe can happen.