Quotes About Diversity

Right now, black female artists are the most interesting people to think about. People are ready to hear whatever we're gonna say, and I'm not scared to say anything.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

People are very ready to criticize other people's accents. There's no correlation between accents and intelligence or accents and criminality, but people do make judgments.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it.

I can do so many accents that I'll never be able to use. There aren't casting calls for a black guy to play a Scottish highlander. I can hope. I've got my brogue ready. I just need the opportunity!

I was ready to get out of the box and play something a little different than what everybody has seen.

I love India so much. It's sort of the most chaotic but also disciplined place at the same time. Every time I go there, I feel like I'm ready to rock and roll.

Until this movie I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already, and am ready for this phase of my career.

An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.

If you get a guy that can play a couple positions, it helps you out a real lot.

I've had a lot of different companies. I've been in banking and automobiles and real estate and a lot of things.

I was a ball boy for the Atlanta Falcons; I was a tax assessor - this was all in high school - I was an account assistant at the courthouse, and then I was a real estate assistant.

Every day is different in real estate, which is why I love it.

The motto of my institute has always been, 'If they can see it, they can be it.' And it's literally true. If we show something on-screen, it will change what happens in real life.

I sometimes get asked: 'How come the men in your stories don't have such strong characters?' And I'm like: 'I don't care.' I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It's not erasure; it's just they're not the focus. In real life, they're quite nice.

I'm quite chameleon in my work - not normally looking much like I do in real life.

Growing up in New Orleans helped me live a real life. I experienced so many things.

Anyone who wants to offer me as mushy, earthy, crunchy a role as they can, I will probably take it. In real life, I cry at a drop of a hat, and I'm a mom, and I'm pretty mushy! We all have so many colors as actors that we want to show.

It would be easier for people to grasp that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are different things if we had as much imagination in real life as we do when we are making our movies.

I grew up as a Christian, and one of the many things in Christian mythology that did not dovetail with real life is that human beings are not monochromatic in their being.

People have said, 'You don't need to do any more biopics. You don't need to play any more real people.' I don't agree with that.

I've always known and been interested in people who are a little bit off the norm. I like to call attention to the idea that they are there, that they are real people, not invisible.

It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.

There are definitely a lot of roles I didn't get based off of the way I look, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm going to write stories for myself or work with filmmakers who want to tell stories about real people.