It's actually meditative to sit in a character for an extended period of time, realizing what your relationship is to who you're playing and then letting go, just being there.

If you choose to be Frankenstein with Botox and plastic surgery, you've bought your own private mask.

As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your heritage.

Marriage is an exercise in torture.

Some people ask me, Do they put aging makeup on you? It's just this very nice street makeup.

It's like real life: We don't get a preview of what's coming up, thank God, and we don't build our own character from what we're going to be informed with in the future.

'Six Feet Under' was so much about life. Sure, it had a lot to do with death, but that's the fun - that now I became a dead person.

A quick thought shot through my mind. Could I really drown in a dream? I remembered the movie the Matrix. If you died in the matrix, you died in real life. I wasn’t about to take a chance...

My experience of what can happen and what actually happens is a world apart, so stop worrying!

I'm trusting in the Lord and a good lawyer.

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

Knowing the 'right answers' does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they're true.

I'm on a shoppin spree to get whatever is in store

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I was blessed to get an education available to few black women in Africa at that time. Every woman should be able to get an education so she can serve others.

When I played, I received racial abuse but I was just one of a few black players and we weren't backed up by the authorities.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.