When you are kind to someone in trouble, you hope they'll remember and be kind to someone else. And it'll become like a wildfire.

[On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything.

When I was nine years old, Star Trek came on, I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!' I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.

We have a lot of trans friends. We know lots of people who have been trying to [model]; we know a lot about it.

If you're not sure how you feel about same-sex marriage, go and meet some of the families and see what they're looking for. Once you take it out of the caricature of what gay people are and what gay marriage is, and put it in the reality of family and what these folks are fighting for, it's really amazing.

I have the strangest time to get cast in anything. 'Ghost' was the same thing. Six months I had to wait for them to decide they had seen everybody possible. Why not? What limits me? I'm black? Oh, am I black?

I've learned to take time for myself and to treat myself with a great deal of love and respect, because I like me.. I think I'm kind of cool.