I just want to keep having the courage to raise the bar for myself, and to keep striving for excellence in artistic integrity and public service. And to continue to challenge myself to move outside of my comfort zone, personally and professionally.

When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

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.

It is important to have friends and family around that I love and trust and who love and trust me.

I'd never really heard of financial abuse, although it makes so much sense when you hear it defined.

I work very physically as an actor. The biggest thing for me has been the challenge of how to be this person [Olivia Pope] with the personal transformation that's going on for me physically... That hasn't been easy. It's been an awesome challenge for me...because so much of how I access character is through my body.

My brain and my heart are really important to me. I don't know why I wouldn't seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth. I go to the dentist. So why wouldn't I go to a shrink?