My constant prayer for myself is to be used in service for the greater good.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Move with the flow. Don't fight the current. Resist nothing. Let life carry you. Don't try to carry it.

I will not be taking a paternity test, ever!

One of my purposes is to use the television show as a voice to not only entertain people, as I did in the beginning, but as a source of information, as a source of enlightenment, wherever we can, and also as a source of lifting people up wherever you can.

When you make loving others the story of your life, there's never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another.

I live inside God's dream for me. I don't try to tell God what I'm supposed to do. . . God can dream a bigger dream for you than you can dream for yourself.