I don't think I'm unlike a lot of people. I am just someone who is trying to find that mate, and I think it's a really hard thing to do.

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

I can't imagine my life without animals. I have two dogs and three cats. Coming home and finding them all lined up at the door waiting for me has got to be one of the sweetest joys of my life.

By the time I left school, I had a lot of tenacity.

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.

I never put myself in that box of you're an Oscar winner so you can only do this or that. That's one award, one night, and it does not define my career or it does not define me as an artist. I never wanted to get put in that Oscar box because that's a lonely place to be.