I'm a much better mother at 46... than if I were like, 21 or 25.

And you also have to do movies that are about commerce because that's what is required of the industry today.

I see women in their 30s getting plastic surgery, pulling this up and tucking that back. It's like a slippery slope - once you start you pull one thing one way and then you think, 'Oh my God, I've got to do the other side.'

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

Sexiness is a state of mind - a comfortable state of being. It's about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments.

I don't see a white woman. I see a black woman, even though my mother is white. Knowing that has made my life easier, I think.

But I just don't think it's an abyss of nothingness [after death] and that we fall off and that our journey stops. I think it's circular and we go and we go and we go. I know that there are civilizations that I think are way more sophisticated than we are and I think more sophisticated civilizations lived before us.