I am not myself; I am the potential of myself.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

Each person has a literature inside them.

I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.

Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.

If I do three interviews in a day, I can be exhausted, because the process of hearing everyone requires that I empty out myself. While I'm listening, my own judgments and prejudices certainly come up. But I know I won't get anything unless I get those things out of the way.

When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.