'Cars' has been a godsend. I mean, I get paid to talk into a mic. Honestly, I had no idea it would become as big as it did. When I first got the part of Mater, it was actually a small part. I did the voicing for it, though, and the animators liked it...
You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get yo...
I have this wonderful personal chef who sources and stocks all my organic produce and I basically live on five smoothies a day. I'm totally vegan. I blend this green concoction with kale, cucumber, broccoli, string beans, avocado. My protein comes fr...
I'm trying to open up my range and really sing more. With The Fugees initially, and even with 'Miseducation,' it was very hip-hop - always a singing over beats. I don't think people have really heard me sing out. So if I do record again, perhaps it w...
The first person I ever really got starstruck over was Nicole Kidman, because I looked up to her. When I was younger, I wouldn't get parts because of how tall I was. I had the body of a 15-year-old but the face of a 12-year-old. I always looked at Ni...
Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I've used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 - things died out, ...
I was horribly shy all through grade school and high school. But somehow I got up the nerve to audition for one play in high school - 'Auntie Mame.' I got a small part as the fiancee who comes on in the end. I got laughs. I wasn't shy at all doing th...
When I was younger, coming up in this industry, I was 17, 18 years old. You couldn't tell me Beyonce wasn't my friend. You couldn't tell me that Janet Jackson wasn't my girl. You couldn't tell me that once I signed to my label that me and J.Lo weren'...
My cut is blunt and futuristic, and Nicki Minaj started wearing that bob on her head after she came to my show, so at the end of the day, I know what I do, and I know what I possess, and I know who I am. I'm a trendsetter. The biggest form of flatter...
I like to go to the gym with my girls, practice yoga, try new recipes, bake, have slumber parties, go to the beach, have adventures, book hunt, shop for new records, or road trip somewhere... anything that keeps me laughing and excited about the day,...
I have a stationary bike that I do twice a week, but I'm not really serious about it. I just do it until I get tired. And then I have a step thing that I really hate. It's hard on your knees. I have a treadmill that keeps getting stuck. It's nice to ...
My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. ...
I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody's ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the 'n' word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to bel...
To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that...
Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs... I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it wou...
So as long as I'm a human being and I'm not perfect, I'm able to say I'm having some growing pains. Because in order to sustain where you are once you made such a breakthrough that everyone is looking at you, now everyone is like, 'Ooh, is she gonna ...
That's the thing about zombies. They don't adapt and they don't think. Literally, you could have a zombie on one side of a chain link fence and you could be on the other side and they could be trying to get to you and six feet down could be an open d...
Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I c...
I think people hate me pretty much across the board, which is nice. I mean, it's a pretty evenhanded loathing among a certain amount of the critical population, which used to be about 80 percent. So now I've gotten to the point where I just don't wor...
If an alien race lands on the planet Earth tomorrow and asks me to prove I'm really here, what do I do? What do I give them? What do I tell them? What do I show them? I can't sing or dance. I can't paint. I've never built anything, and I've never con...
I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You'd get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart's 'The Caine Mutiny,' which was playing in the theater across from the telephone booth where I ...
