You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.

Art curates compassion. Art to me breaks down walls and allows us to step into somebody else's shoes.

I feel like I barely survived Django (Unchained) emotionally - the violence, hearing the N-word every day. It cost me a lot psychologically, but it was worth it to tell that story.

I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.

My understanding of Twitter was that it was a bunch of famous people telling you when they're going to the bathroom. And, that was not something I wanted to be part of.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?