I think you just have to do you, whatever that is, and not feel like you have to be a certain way for other people to like you.
If there's anyone out there that looks a bit like me, or just feels a little bit out of place just trying to get into performing, you are beautiful; embrace it. You are intelligent; embrace it. You are powerful; embrace it.
Don't sit there and complain. Rub your hands together and figure out what to do.
I have to go to sleep with music.
In drama school, they do these big shows and period dramas, and I felt that none of those shows were representing me as a person, and I knew I wouldn't be cast in any of those when I left school. I decided to write my own one-woman show, and that was called 'Chewing Gum Dreams.'
To see people laughing or crying or listening, then being inspired to do their own thing? I can't think of anything better than that.
What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary school - like high school - I met many other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose parents were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing.
Comedy in the past hasn't spoken to women because it wasn't written by women, and male writers don't make women three-dimensional characters. Too often, women just facilitate the man's comedy: they're not crazy; they're not funny. But women are as vulgar as they are elegant, as stinky as they are smelling of eau de parfum.
The first time I got into astrology was being in New York. I was like, 'Oh, this is a real thing here!' Now, I'll Google what your sign is and what my sign is to see the predictions of friendship, and I find that really cool. But that's the most I know.
We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us, or behind us to drive us forward. I feel like telling all the people who look like me to start trying to write. You don't know it's possible because it's not often in front of you.
I feel that when you want to start attacking people or completely rejecting the people you see as not on the godly side, to me, that isn't God, and that isn't love.
I didn't know I was going to write for TV until I was suddenly writing for TV, so that kind of stuff can bewilder you.
Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off.
Now I'm steeped in this world, I keep thinking going to the theatre every week is normal, but there's a whole world of people who don't go at all. I wrote 'Chewing Gum Dreams' for them - I'd love them to come.
I feel angry with myself the way I handled the Bible and Christianity. A lot more people are more normal with Christianity. I was crazy... telling people you will go to hell. I lost all my friends because of my militant faith.
I've been bullied about my appearance since forever.
Inequality starts in the womb.
I love Issa Rae. I adore her.
'Chewing Gum' is a sitcom set on an estate in east London. Its central character is a girl from a Pentecostal background who decides to embark on a more worldly lifestyle - it's about adolescence 10 years too late. In my dreams, everybody is watching it, finding out about my world and realising it's not what they imagined. That it's not terrifying.
We need to encourage black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny, that they have important stories to tell, and that they are capable, so magically capable, of writing them and creating important pieces of work that will live forever in history.
