“I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.”

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.

Every artist, true artist, struggles with an overwhelming sense of feeling like you’re not worthy.

Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea Goes to Jail!’ Which, I have to tell you, of everything that I’ve ever done in my career, that’s the only thing that’s perked up the ears of my nieces and nephews. That is it, that’s done it for them. That made me a bona fide star in their eyes!

I’ve been in this business 25 years. I’ve been eking out a living doing Broadway, off-Broadway… I’ve seen the unemployment line a lot.

Ultimately, it’s not your job, as an actress, to satisfy people’s expectations or image of who you should be. Even in your life, you are just who you are.

This is the end of this subject for me for a long time.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

To become a star is the beginning of the end. I don’t really want to be saddled with a screen persona.

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

A preposition is a word You mustn’t end a sentence with!

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

Freedom is not an end. Freedom is a beginning.