We're living based on laws and ideas that we, as a society, embraced back in the days of slavery.

If your dream only includes you, it's too small.

Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.

Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.

Don't wait for permission to do something creative.

If you're doing something outside of dominant culture there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.

When you're in your lane, there's no traffic.

We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

I've passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it's not happening to you; it's happening for you.

Stop asking, start doing.

If your work is solid, it really doesn't matter what people you know because good work starts to rise to the top.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Change is both exciting and scary. Learning new skills is the same. Having an idea of what to expect emotionally is as important as knowing what to expect from both real and imagined limitations.

If I wasn't an actress, I'd be a designer. I love interior design and inventing things that are practical but also beautiful - looking at a space and creating magic.

My parents have been married 50-some years, and I've never heard them fight. I got the chance to attend great universities and medical school.

It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.

You cannot compel someone to love. Love is like the wind. It comes when it does, it stops when it does, it changes direction when it does. Who are you and I to criticize the wind?

Prizes do not mean anything to me. I think it is more important to make a child aware of the existence of a weird creature like a water spider that breathes through its backside.

Richard Burton rang me up once and said, Do you know you're my only leading lady I've never slept with? I said, Well, please don't tell everybody, it's the worst image.

That's one of those questions I'm asked more often than anything else. Will my dog go to heaven? And I say well, the lion will lay down with the lamb.

Faith doesn't make sense. It makes miracles.