Quotes from Teyonah Parris

You have to be resilient to be a black person in America. The thing about being resilient is being able to fall apart and pick yourself up again. And putting yourself back together, that improves on what you were before.

When I looked at 'Dear White People,' you have four African-American students who are all very different and who are trying to figure out who they are. They're dealing with identity issues and crises. That is exciting to me, to see African-American young people on a page, on a screen, who are so diverse and whose stories are all so different.

I, for myself, have wanted to get more into producing because I want to be a part of the conversation and be one of the voices in the story we're trying to tell.

I really feel like the stars have aligned many ways, many times for me. I have been blessed to play some awesome roles and nuanced and meaningful characters.

Every time I see my friends on a billboard, I'm so excited. If God can do it for me or them, he can do it for everybody.

It was not hard for me to find guidance and motivation. I'm very blessed, and my parents were always so supportive of myself and my brother. Whatever you wanted to do, you just had to give 110 percent. So whatever that was, they supported it.

I love my 'Survivor's Remorse' cast. They are so funny and crazy, like a big dysfunctional family. It's so much fun, and I love the issues that we talk about on that show. We deal with nuanced and controversial issues, and we do it in a way that's funny. It's comedy.

I went straight from filming the second season of 'Survivor's Remorse,' and the creators over there were so supportive in letting me go early so I could film 'Chi-Raq.' And that was an amazing experience.

I'm like any other girl: I see the Instagram posts and the Tumblr stuff. I'm inspired by what my fellow girls are doing.

Whatever it is you do, study it, learn the ins and outs of it, and really work on building your craft.

I don't even watch basketball. I can't even pretend.

I think social media is a slippery slope because while you're projecting something out to people, they also project back onto you what they want to see.

When you have filmmakers like Justin Simien, writers, producers, actresses like Lena Waithe, who are people of color, they're creating their own content and saying, 'You know what? We're not going to wait on someone else to tell our story. We're going to do it ourselves. You can be a part of it or not.'

Every time I get a role, or the opportunity to explore a role, I look at it, and I think, 'What is the story we're trying to tell here?'

When I look at material, I get excited by things that are telling the truth because that's what you want to do: tell somebody else's truth.

In working with Nick Cannon, he's such a generous guy, a generous actor, and he was very protective.

I think, no matter who you are, at some point in your life you've probably said, 'OK, well, who am I, and where do I fit in?'

I had been getting relaxers since I was eight or nine. I had no clue. It was a personal mission to really find out who am when I'm not altering myself to look like anybody else. Who am I when I wake up and I don't do anything to my hair? Who is that woman? I want to meet her. And that was what catapulted my journey into going natural.

When I'm filming, I keep my hair in cornrows so that they can fit a wig on top of my hair.

I was a wild child tomboy.

Why aren't there films being made that tell ethnically diverse stories? Or why is it so impossible to allow a person of color to add their texture and their essence to a role that is not ethnically specific? I don't know why it's a novel or risky idea to consider making a film look like how our world actually looks today.

It feels good to be a role model for little girls who don't often see natural hair on the red carpet.

An actor hears 'no' more often than the average person. A black human and a black woman on top of that? That's a lot of no's.

I always want to tell the truth. It doesn't have to be a pretty truth, and it doesn't have to be a life-changing and life-threatening truth like 'Chi-Raq.' But I want to tell someone's truth in an effort to inspire people to see themselves reflected on the screen.