I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.

We've become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth and, frankly, I'm really saddened by the way women mutilate their faces today in search of that.

My mother never wanted me to focus on my physical self. She always said that beauty is what you do.

If you set out to do something and you give it your all and it doesn't work out, be willing to modify your goal slightly. Have the ability to look in another direction. A small shift could guide you to the real purposes of your life.

I no longer scramble blindly through hardship. I no longer emerge from a bad time feeling relieved just to have survived. Instead of despairing, I try to find the lesson within the experience.

I learned up less is more.The makeup used to wear me and now I wear the makeup.

I've always thought what was I before I was this and then what will I be when I leave here. I really had a hard time always accepting that at some point I'm just going to turn to dust and ashes and never be again and that the journey would stop. I believe that we are souls, kind of like a version of what our movie presents, and we come here again and again until we arrive at our highest evolution, and what happens after that I don't know.