“When I was a little kid, I was the first kid in my neighborhood to have a pet alligator.”

Some roles have been with me forever

Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That’s probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.

There’s a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.

When some people get parts, they feel they can now relax, but for me it was always the opposite. Sometimes before I do a movie or before I act out a scene, I may not sleep well the night before. If I don’t know what the scene is about, I might get all worked up.

I’m a fan myself, so when a fan does something that might be strange, I understand it.

The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.

You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.

I get more choices of things, projects, which is a blessing and a curse. I can only do one at a time. Sometimes you don’t know which way to go.

I’ve liked most of the films that I’ve been in and those are the kinds of films I like to see.

I trained as a theatre actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.

I don’t think I could be a foot soldier. I don’t know if I could take orders too good. I’m a little lazy.

I think that the Oscar gives you some kind of guts or something, it gives you the illusion that you can do it. It’s good for business.

I’ve done a lot of movies, and you really never know. You do a movie and you think that it’s great, and then you see it and it doesn’t work.

I think having a vision can make someone an influential man. I’m not talking about acting or anything like that, I’m talking about people I admire, whether it’s a writer or a musician or a sports figure or a politician, whatever.

Am I getting better at making choices? Well, I think I might be getting better at reading scripts.

I like to wake up and just feel gratitude. Gratitude for waking up, for my health, for my kids, for my family. A lot of times in the evening, I’ll write down what my goals are for the next day; When I wake up, I look at that list again. I meditate.

I always love it when I hear back from kids who say they discovered Percy Jackson and now wear their learning difference as a badge of honour.

My husband is so cheap. On Christmas Eve, he fires one shot and tells the kids Santa committed suicide.

We need to look at our nannying, mollycoddled, politically correct culture in my view, which stops kids from going out and playing competitive sport. I also think we need to look at the shear fatness of the regulations which control people who want to help kids play sport.

You can play some schlock like New Kids On the Block.

Kids, Madison Avenue is lying to you. Your parents are lying to you. The president is lying to you.

It’s so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one foot putt and everybody is saying “Shhh” and not moving a muscle.

My parents were vegetarians. I’d show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.