I never really took any acting classes. I'm just a natural ham, I guess.

My mom has always been my champion. She was very smart and grounded. She said, 'Save your money. Pay your taxes. Don't put everything in one basket,' but she let me explore and be creative.

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

Roxanne Shanté was kind of the first female to really come out and get respected by dudes, because she went at dudes real hard and battled them and freestyled a lot, and really came off the head a lot.

I approach the film business the way I feel about self-esteem. It's something that has to be maintained. That's kind of how I feel about positive roles in Hollywood. They have to be maintained. You have to purposefully, intentionally try to make the right type of films. And the more people that do that, the more things will continue to improve.

I tend to share whatever I know in general. I've never been a person to horde information for the sake of my own skin, you know what I mean? Not share so somebody doesn't take your job, I've never had that kind of insecurity. I also had a management company, too, so we were always one of those companies that shared information with our artists. Whatever they wanted to know, as much as they wanted to know, they could know.

Sometimes I pray when I really feel like I need God to help me with something, and sometimes we just have conversations. We just kick it.