It's important to be gentle about my routines. I've learned that the hard way. When I'm really stressed out, I can take it out on my body and hurt myself. Sometimes I need to be as loving and soft with myself as possible. I've had to learn how to pay...
If you got a dope girl, there's going to be people that want her. But I don't know, I've always kept my 'A-game' on point. I just make a point to make sure the woman that I'm with is taken care of. You got to keep it new, so I go out of my way to mak...
A girl’s got to use what she’s given and I’m not going to make a guy drool the way a Britney video does. So I take it to extremes. I don’t say I dress sexily on stage - what I do is so extreme. It’s meant to make guys think: ‘I don’t kn...
If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It...
The sweetest thing I've ever known was like the kiss on the collarbone, the soft caress of happiness, the way you walk, your style of dress, I wish I didn't get so weak, oh baby just to hear you speak, makes me argue just to see how much your in love...
When you start performing, you realize that you have to separate yourself from the pack. So I would never wear bell-bottoms, which everybody else was wearing. I had short hair - and to see a 21-year-old guy walk onstage without longish hair was, in i...
You always want to break away from your parents, and you always think, 'I'm never going to be like that guy.' What I've discovered is you kind of wind up becoming your parents, which is also a cliche in itself. My father, despite the fact that he's b...
There have been times when people who weren't my friends all of a sudden became my friend. I won't allow them to use me, but I have been pretty lucky to have friends who have supported me and who I have known since I was 12. They are still the same a...
My little sister Aliana's opinions are the most important to me. She says, 'I want to look like you, you're so pretty!' But she is very beautiful and so she is trouble in the making! She wants to do what I do. I'm like her second mother and I am very...
When I first was trying to play the clubs around Houston to start playing my own songs, songwriters like Eric Taylor and Vince Bell and Townes Van Zandt and Don Sanders were just really encouraging to me and would let me sit in with them during their...
We have over an hour of footage with Ken Marino. Same with Kevin Smith. Because you never know, when you let people who are so talented at improv go, what you're going to get. You don't want to strangle them with your own words, because probably what...
Listen, if you were with me on a plane? I'm embarrassed for the people who sit next to me. I have such a regimen! I, like, pound on the face cream because your face will dry out, I get the stuff you put in your nose so no nose germs come in, I take e...
I completely think of myself as sexual. Completely and utterly. Probably more so than I did when I was 30. I don't know why. I'm very comfortable with how I look. I'm absolutely committed to never having anything done to my face. I would never let an...
Ever since I was a kid, I was always a fan of hip hop. If you get your limelight whether your sixteen or twenty-one or wherever you're at, you get your lime when you get your lime, but if you're a part of hip hop and a child of hip hop, then you will...
I give myself homework when I have an audition. I give myself goals, and that's how I check how I'm doing. It can be something simple like 'listen,' or 'find your feet.' And then afterward it's an assessment, so in a way it's not about booking the jo...
My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This...
Ralph Fiennes was a pivotal influence on me. He asked me, 'So what is it you want to do?' I very shyly, timidly admitted that I wanted to be an actor. He sighed, and he said, 'Lupita, only be an actor if you feel there is nothing else in the world yo...
The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other...
In the summer of 2012 - and we do as we do when we get together to brainstorm an idea - we were both probably eating grilled cheese and watching 'Oprah's Favorite Things,' so it will never end, and we both brought a few things to the table of what we...
We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people ...
I never thought I had a career. I think Meryl Streep has a career. I have jobs that I am lucky to get... I'm one of those actresses who never turns down a part, no matter how small. I don't have the luxury of picking and choosing. I take everything.
