Be friendly to everybody; protect yourself; people sometimes want a piece of you for no good reason; and always do things out of love not fear.

People are very nice to me, and they've been nice as my career has gotten better and I've gotten more jobs. But the reality is that if I decided tomorrow that I didn't want to act anymore, it's not like people are going to be like, "Please, come back!"

I have a lot of girl friends who are very adept at making friends, and guys are just not.

I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.

I think you make mistakes, especially in your twenties, where you date guys you wouldn't even be friends with - ever.

I've never been in a writer's room.

With any television series - and it's something that is taken for granted with movies because you have the whole arc within two hours - you establish who the character is and it's a two-dimensional version, or if you're lucky, a two and a half-dimensional character. Once you establish that, you can move forward and break all the rules. Once the audience has accepted who the person is, then you can do the exact opposite. What makes it funny and interesting is doing the opposite.