Having the perfect body doesn't fix all your problems, or make you love yourself more. To me, it's all about being comfortable in your own skin.

The hardest part of this year has been learning to enjoy it. It's almost like a full-time job reminding myself to live in the moment and not look for more, more, more...I see now that people who make movies, this world of creative geniuses that I grew up idolizing, are just normal people who wanted to do something and made it happen. Everything that's happened to me in the last year has only made me feel more like a normal person, more human, but in the most beautiful way.

When you finish a series like 'Ugly Betty,' there are so many voices around you telling you what you should be doing next and what would be good for your future, sometimes you can't hear yourself. I've gotten pretty good at tuning everyone else out. Now it's just me; what pleases me creatively.

How much time have I wasted on diets and what I look like? People are saying 'We love you and love what you do' and you're sitting there thinking 'I'm not skinny enough or pretty enough.' It's taken a lot of work to get over that.

What’s hard about being on the other side of the world is that sometimes the problem feels so big that changing one life doesn’t feel like enough. But it is.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I’m born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don’t speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker

Kids not only understand [a dark story] but appreciate it … Because in the real world there's fear, and dark things happen no matter how young you are. People lose parents, people lose friends … There's darkness in the world. So I think when kids are talked to in that way, they appreciate it. They're not being given some candy-coated, 'Oh, this is a world where there are no stakes.' I think that actually insults their intelligence.