“Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It’s always the unspoken word and what’s happening behind someone’s eyes that makes it so rich.”

Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it’s filet mignon.

I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am

I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.

As an artist, you’ve got to see the mess. That’s what we do. We get a human being, and it’s like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

That is a huge need for a lot of women, even in 2016. You can have the most ambitious career woman, and at the end of the day, she’s like, ‘I just want to be a mom.

Cicely Tyson was my inspiration to become an actor.

Sometimes you see how humanity can rise above any kind of cultural ills and hate that a person’s capacity to love and communicate and forgive can be bigger than anything else.

That’s how I digest it, ’cause I can press the fast-forward button and I know that I’m gonna have to continue to be an actor, continue to make choices, continue to perform in a show every week.

Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes – that’s what it is, as an actor.

Knowing the only way out is education, even if you don’t have parents that are extraordinarily wealthy. I understand that I have to be an active participant in [my daughter’s] education in order for her to thrive in the world.

I am the mother of a 6-year-old now, so that’s changed my entire perspective.

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.

I talk to women all the time and try to impart wisdom.

The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.

We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.

When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.

I was talking to a guy who was holding his 18-month-old daughter with the only limb he had left, and he had a smile on his face. I thought, ‘I’m not even a 10th of this man.’

I am a vicar’s daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. – From The Brooklyn Nine

If you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.

In a cave where everything is fragranced with water, she asks for a daughter instead of praying for a son.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest.