People who are alone all the time never grow. Those hermits just stay the same. It's only through relationships. Relationships change us and make us grow.
I think tapping into one's power and one's potential is a very frightening thing.
The reason I became an actress is because I wanted my acting to reflect life as it is. I want to put truth on the screen. I want real women to see real women on the screen.
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.
The only picture I have of my childhood is the picture of me in kindergarten. I have this expression on my face - it's not a smile, it's not a frown. I swear to you, that's the girl who wakes up in the morning and who looks around her house and her life saying, 'I cannot believe how God has blessed me.'
Vanity destroys your work. That's the one thing you have to let go of as an actor. I don't care how sexy or beautiful any woman is. At the end of the day, she has to take her makeup off. At the end of the day, she's more than just pretty.
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.
Acting is not rocket science, but it is an art form. What you are doing is illuminating humanity. Or not.
I did everything to get food. I have stolen for food. I have jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I have befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food, and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.
I didn't aspire to be just a celebrity; I aspired to be an actress... I always wanted to be respected as someone who knew their craft.
When a character has so many secrets and so much inner life, it's a joy to play those characters because you can use your craft.
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.
Self-deprecation is not the answer to humility.
The big 'Aha!' moment is that the trauma never goes away.
I would love to do really great work and for women who are marginalised to see me as an inspiration.
What it meant for me to win the Emmy is I found it. It's not just the award. It's what it's going to mean to young girls - young brown girls, especially. When they saw a physical manifestation of a dream, I felt like I had fulfilled a purpose.
I don't see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They're very seldom written.
August Wilson is the one writer that writes about men like my father, who had a fifth grade education, who was a janitor at McDonald's.
It became motivation as opposed to something else - the thing about poverty is that it starts affecting your mind and your spirit because people don't see you. I chose from a very young age that I didn't want that for my life. And it very much has helped me appreciate and value the things that are in my life now because I never had it.
When you're working as an actor, you don't think that when you get out of school, it's going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don't think that people are going to see you in a certain way.
