I think at the end of the day she [Rose from "Fences"] is a strong woman in the truest sense of the word. I think all of that is in the narrative; it's already there. The hope is there; the playfulness is there; it's there. I wish I could take credit for it, but it's there.

Just because I was 30 doesn't mean I was grown. God, I was such an idiot. I was an absolute idiot at 30. And I grew up.

I just look at women sometimes and I just want to ask them, "Do you know how fabulous you are?"

On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

Any actor will tell you, as soon as your ego and your vanity come into the mix, it destroys your work. Completely destroys it.

I have to say, doing theater, that's what you're trained to do. Doing film, when I first started doing it, felt like something else entirely. It felt like the difference between, I don't know, waiting tables and painting a great work of art. It's night and day. I didn't feel like it was even acting.