I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.
The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.
You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.
Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.
Do you want to be an artist so that the whole world will look at you, or do you want to be an artist because you would like to use your ability to attract attention, to have the world see itself through you differently?
Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.
I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
What my work is, is my approach to it. It's the practice. And my work is about the effort that I make to get there. And I think if there's anything artistic, it's in that middle space.
People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.
Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.
