I love '30 Rock.' Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show.

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

I don't really want to do things that I feel like are going to send out a message that I don't really want to sign up for.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

Motherhood so often comes in conflict with women's capacity to express and live their own lives.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.

We have the ability to write the blueprint for our own goals, and decide how we want to pursue them. If we allow others to do it for us, we won’t achieve our full potential to be the best we can be.

Divine open doors are not for the arrogant, adulterers and wasters, they are only meant for the humble that will be wise with the opportunity and blessing that comes from them.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

Never tell anyone that you're writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death.

I am here to paint you a picture of the world I see

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.