I am not a writer, but I feel that when our production company is successful, we'll be able to give some young writers with fresh voices an opportunity to put their work out there.

The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes. But when you hit a wall in your personal life, and you screw up, people don't give you a chance to navigate your way through it and tap into what's extraordinary about you.

When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.

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.

The internal sexism within womanhood is very ­predominant in Hollywood, because we all want to be ­successful. There's a plug to it: You all have to be skinny! You all have to be pretty! You all have to be likable, because that's the ­formula that works. On an ­executive level. On a power level. And it's not always the same working with black people, because of the internalized racism. The colorism.

I really want my acting to be definitive a lot of times, but I must feel like in any given moment there is a lot of things going on with Rose. I kept telling Denzel [Washington] throughout filming [Fences] that the house is her joy and her tomb.

It's always hard to be private in public, which is what acting is because you have to do thing really emotionally naked.