If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself and I think that's often hard for us to do.

The man for me is the cherry on the pie. But I'm the pie and my pie is good all by itself. Even if I don't have a cherry.

If you set out to do something and you give it your all and it doesn't work out, be willing to modify your goal slightly. Have the ability to look in another direction. A small shift could guide you to the real purposes of your life.

I'm done with men... I'm going to be alone. I have no luck with relationships. I don't think I'm made for marriage.

When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there's no way you could be a good winner.

I know that I will never find my father in any other man who comes into my life, because it is a void in my life that can only be filled by him.

Blackness is a state of mind, and I identify with the black community. Mainly, because I realized, early on, when I walk into a room, people see a black woman, they don't see a white woman. So out of that reason alone, I identify more with the black community.

I spent a lot of time with a crown on my head.

The times may have changed, but the people are still the same. We're still looking for love, and that will always be our struggle as human beings.

Let me tell you something - being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory.

Don't take yourself too seriously. Know when to laugh at yourself, and find a way to laugh at obstacles that inevitably present themselves.

When you're on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That's true of all of life, but it's very vivid on a film set because you're always managing that.

I love movies, so getting to be in the conversation and meet some of my heroes has been so fun. It's just the most fun thing ever.

I get nerdy and nervous around not only great actors, but great directors and DPs I love.

I love big, sprawling movies where there are too many characters, and people get introduced halfway through, and you're like, 'Wait, who are these people?'

I'm interested in long careers where you take detours.

One of my favorite things about Telluride is because it's so small, the directors are really there for each other. You look at another director, and they feel the same thing you feel.

Whenever you work with someone who you idolize, you realize... he's just a person trying to make a movie as best he knows how. And that doesn't look so different from other people trying to do the same thing.

Having health insurance made me feel like a real person. Up until then, it felt like I was getting away with something, and if three things went wrong, it would all fall apart.

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27, it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I've lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.

I feel like, when I play characters, I create a space in myself that feels like the character and that doesn't go away. Somehow, you carry that with you. You let it go, but a little piece of it remains.

There are a lot of love stories in 'Maggie's Plan,' but the deepest, truly romantic one is between Maggie and her daughter.

When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.