“They say the two most important days in a person’s life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.”

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.

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.

A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.

Happy the heart where love has come to birth.

Truth is the only healthy place from which to speak. Assumption is the birthplace of godless chatter.

I lost and found myself in all your maybe’s.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.

When you believe in your dream and your vision, then it begins to attract its own resources. No one was born to be a failure.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.