Everybody has a part of her body that she doesn't like, but I've stopped complaining about mine because I don't want to critique nature's handiwork ... My job is simply to allow the light to shine out of the masterpiece.

People live a lot freer in their body and their voices and their moves than people act onscreen.

When black women stick together, we are the most powerful force in the universe.

As an adult after college and as an artist I thought about what was real, what sustained me - it was Christian Science. I was using that when I didn't know it. Saying yes to the Light and your better instinct.

I have always done what I wanted to do.

Americans have a hard time writing moms. I'll get a script and everything's really great and well-drawn, but the mom is like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of "mother." You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, and you could switch them around, and they'd be the same person. I think it's because most people don't really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite.

Does my character hate Bree? Well, let's just put it this way. Bree hasn't seen the last of me. I gave that drunk gal a ride home a few episodes ago and she turned on me!