“Beauty is not just a white girl. It’s so many different flavors and shades.”

So often, you don’t get that opportunity. You only go over everything once and, the next thing you know, you’re on set.

I learned you really do have to make sure you enjoy life.

I enjoy just being me. I don’t need to be Queen Latifah, the brand, 24 hours a day.

To me, doing a gay pride show is one of the most fun things. My first show that paid more than $10,000 was in a gay club on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco.

Most people don’t have so much talent that they can become a success all their own. We all need people to help us and lift us up.

To me, I always felt like I was carrying a torch for women of any size to be themselves – it doesn’t matter whether you’re a size 2 or a 22, just be who you are.

Every woman is a queen, and we all have different things to offer.

Dreams become reality when we put our minds to it.

It’s not always easy to do the right thing. But, doing the right thing makes you strong, it builds character.

Be bold, be brave enough to be your true self.

I write pretty often. I have a home studio. Music is what I do for fun. I never get tired of it, so to take a break from [TV and movies], I would go make some music.

If my brother and I wanted money in our pockets, we had to get jobs – my first was at 15, at Burger King.

There are different flavours of sexiness.

There are so many things I’d like to do. Like becoming a parent. To me that is the next natural progression in life.

You need to give yourself the time to think freely. I don’t know if that is political. But sometimes things are political because you observe things that are right or that are wrong and you want to speak on them.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

Things are never as bad as they seem.

Some nights I wear nothing but the thought of you, and I am breathtaking.

Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

I want to look otherworldly, like I was made in a factory.

I saw opportunity appear in an ugly six-spindle shake machine … and grabbed it.

His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.