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.

The ones I love most are the people who the flaws show. I like doing characters that we see the total person. If people get afraid to show the flaws because they think, "Oh, then nobody will like them," then you end up with a lot of products, and everybody wants to be frigging heroic all the time - not what people are trapped in every day, like your skirt being in your panties after you walk out of the bathroom. Being human. Sometimes when people are drawn to your work, they're drawn because they recognize themselves or their loved ones or their neighbor in it.

You very seldom see a picture where you watch the process of falling in love.

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!

I was like, wait a minute. When I hear my sisters' names, I want to have a joyful feeling in my heart about it.

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

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.