I believe the relationship you have with your government is not so different to a love relationship.

Being on set is a hard thing. A lot of people are like, oh, you get to make a movie, and it's all fun. But the reality is, it's a lot of hours. It's a lot of reshoots; it's a lot of waiting. And you can become increasingly agitated by the amount of time that you are waiting. But that's real.

I do want love. Genuine love.

My mother's a genius. She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had; paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter. You know, she just kept feeding it to me. So we went to see all kinds of theater. We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch.

Beauty is an understanding of what you have, and it's forgiving yourself of what you don't have, and appreciating all of it.

I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.

Seriously, in America there are more big, curvy girls than there are little girls, and men love us, too.