You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.

At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes.

I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.

I also tried to leave myself alone enough to be surprised by the news. That's when it had its potency. If I approach everything with joy and hope and love, which is what we all do. Every day we get up we're hoping that today is going to be the day that's going to get you over the hump. I tried to do that as much as I could. So then when all the news happens you see what she is made out of.

I'm very committed to its educational institutions, including my alma mater Central Falls High School's drama program, because I know that's what got me my start. I do everything I can to keep it alive since it made me feel like I had something to give to the world. I also support the Segue Institute for Learning, a charter school in Central Falls run by a friend of mine that my niece attends. I'm committed to that because of its proven results. They have the highest math scores of any charter school in Rhode Island.

All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn't have to be huge and humongous.

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.