Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.

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.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

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

When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.

You can't be hesitant about who you are.

Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.

I don’t want anyone putting any limits on me.

I don't have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn't love me has to say about me.

All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn't have to be huge and humongous.

Sometimes to love people, I must completely avoid them. Sometimes, to be strong, I must completely fall apart. Sometimes, to create, I must completely destroy.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Leadership is a group project, and all of us are necessary to fill it. Wise leaders will realize this and encourage their groups to develop their own evolving leadership potential.

While you might see a cat on a hot tin roof, a dog on a hot tin roof would be yowling its head off.

In France, you're with the crew, and you have lunch with them. It's more like a family.

Leading a family is the hardest job a man can ever have.

As Miss America, my goal is to bring peace to the entire world and then get my own apartment.

The best guide in life is strength.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless.