"I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas."
"Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality."
"I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down."
"You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy."
"Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor."
"I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way."
"Each person has a literature inside them."
"Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?"
"In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another."
"You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we're all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise."
"I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression."
"We owe the government taxes. We owe our creditors interest. What do these powers owe us?"
"You know, all kinds of people inspire me."
"I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way."
"For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas."
"I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing."
"I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment."
"I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times."
"Not that many people, even contemporary writers, write about right now."
"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."
"I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories."
"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."
"Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible."
"I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives."
"Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America."
