"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."

"It's being willing to walk away that gives you strength and power - if you're willing to accept the consequences of doing what you want to do."

"I'm fighting the label of 'Black' actress simply because it's very limiting in people's eyes, especially people who are making movies."

"Sitting at the table during Color Purple and looking up and suddenly realizing I was acting in front of Steven Spielberg, was pretty cool. It was pretty good."

"Going through the grief period of my dad and losing him - that was the worst thing because you know when you get that call. When you are seven, eight years old, you have that almost vision in your mind of what that's going to be like and what your going to feel like and it doesn't prepare you."

"A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination."

"My idea of a romantic night is to watch action films."

"Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day."