“Nothing is all good or all bad, nothing is black or white, everything is just messy and human and difficult.”

The pain is always bringing me a lesson. If I listen to the lesson when the pain is manageable, the pain won’t get gargantuan and flatten me entirely, because I will have received the message at the center.

Notorious’ is a masterwork. I can watch it every day.

There are a lot of women who feel that they have done all the work in their relationship only for someone else to step in and take the love and credit for it.

I have to meditate before I go to bed, always. I have to let the day go and let the eternal in.

I have to welcome the pain like I welcome the joy.

Love is a true unconditional space to me. To love someone or to be loved is to be seen, and I think, gosh, as humans, all we want is to be seen, to be heard, right? To be valued. To be respected. But mostly just to be held in a safe, unconditional space.

I think true beauty is everywhere. Be it. See it. Notice it. Love it. Be grateful for it. Marvel at it. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us all the time.

It’s a lot of fun to just say to people, proudly, ‘I get to play the First Lady.’ It’s just fun to say.

Absolutely undermining my confidence in every moment. Bad tape in my head all the time.

My dad used to say, ‘Just be yourself and you’ll be fine,’ but it’s really, really true.

I used to be so hard on myself. So hard on myself. Just my own worst critic to the nth degree.

The more I resist anything, the stronger it gets.

I feel it is a blessing, a duty, an honor, that we give the love that we have, and we share the lives that we have with our fullest heart.

There’s a lot of life on the planet that needs love, wants love, deserves love, in whatever capacity we are able.

I miss singing. I did Broadway forever.

I think you choose how you walk through this life. I think if you choose to participate in a paradigm that is looks-based, if you’re an actor, then it can be empowering in some ways, and it can be really limiting in some ways in terms of time and longevity.

As I’ve submerged myself in news of the revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, I wanted desperately to feel part of what was going on. And then it hit me: This is what white people were doing to me after Obama was elected!

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.

Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in white and black the same.

The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to “civilize” Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.