I had this vivid image of myself at the age of 60 looking back on my life and truly regretting the fact that I hadn't tried to be an actor

It's so much more fun to do the work than to talk about it. I will have to admit that. Everybody gets to decide how they feel, and what to take away by themselves, and that's what you hope for. That people will take away different things and have different experiences from the work we do as actors. So I don't like to prescribe how to feel about the work I do.

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

I've had somebody say, "I want you at my wedding, but I don't want you to pull focus, so wear jeans!" Losing my anonymity is something that's proving to be very challenging.... It's good for your soul to walk around unnoticed; there's so much you can't do when everybody knows who you are. And I so miss those little things.

Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.

And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.