I think that's almost what it is sometimes if you sum up what acting is. It's just the ultimate expression of empathy.

The business is all about gush and hype. You never have a bad meeting in L.A.

I used to look like a deer in headlights on the red carpet. You step out of the car and it's bedlam. Everyone's got crazy eyes.

I appreciate a slow-burn romance. In most movies, everyone is just tearing their clothes off in the first scene.

When you're in love, you're so happy that you want to tell people about it. But now I have to censor myself. You need to protect the happiness you have.

The more we mask ourselves, the freer we're able to be within ourselves.

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

People quit on jobs. They quit on marriages. They quit on school. There's an immediacy of this day and age that doesn't lend itself to being committed to anything.

There is absolutely, 100 percent, a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone who stutters.

I've always been quite a spontaneous person, so I would lean more towards, if you feel it and you know its right, then do it.

Things happen in the way they usually should. I'm a pretty fatalistic person.

What do I sing, and what does my tambourine sing?

I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea.

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

My daughter recently reminded me not to get so busy making a living, I forget to make a life and I'm going to take that advice.

Life is too short to waste time harboring bad feelings about anyone. Forgive, forget, then move on!

I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.

I had a head start in acting. Because of my parents, I had a SAG card, an agent and a recognizable name. But I knew if I screwed up, people would never forget. I'd be dead.

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.