You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

I've always had that going on: "I can't," and then I do, so the voice says, "Well, that was an exception!" It's a tug-of-war between two voices: the one who knows she can and the one who's scared she can't.

I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.

Growing up in Kenya, slum life was not far away. I had family that lived in slums, so I visited them often, and so I've seen and interacted with abject poverty. But I also know that because of that, poverty is not the definition of the people that live there.

I'm pretty awesome at making salad dressings.

Being called gorgeous is not a bad thing! But at the same time, I don’t want to thrive on people’s opinions of me.

It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else's.