Quotes

I think it's important to create projects as an actor rather than wait for them. I love being able to take an idea and sell it to a studio.

I'm pretty much the same but trying to be better every day. I don't think the success has gone to my head. I don't think I'm alienating friends or losing friends.

I really don't know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn't build my self-esteem, and it doesn't help me grow me at all.

I'd like to have and adopt [children]. I think I'd be a great mom, honestly. I don't think I'll have any problem giving them all the love in the world. Discipline will be the hard part.

I wish every woman would love herself and embrace what she was given naturally.

I am not one to turn down macaroni and cheese, even late at night. I love Italian food. I love pasta... A refrigerator full of water and Gatorade? Honey, that's just not gonna happen.

There are times you can't really see or even feel how sweet life can be. Hopefully, its mountains will be higher than its valleys are deep. I know things that are broken can be fixed. Take the punch if you have to, hit the canvas and then get up again. Life is worth it.

It was a very vulnerable time going from being insecure about my body and who I am to becoming comfortable with me. I had to tune out what the hell everybody else had to say about who I was. When I was able to do that, I felt free.

Dreams become reality when we put our minds to it.

[on moving from singing to acting] My mom taught me to never put all my eggs in one basket. I figured if I wasn't the best rapper, then I shouldn't completely rely on rap.

[on being considered a role model] There's no way I can represent for everyone. I can't represent for all women or all big women or all black women. It's important for people not to make celebrities their source of who they should be in life. I can't take on the pressure of being perfect. Nobody is.

I don't have to really be in the 60s. Every time I hail a cab in New York, and they pass me by and pick up the white person, then I get a dose of it. Or when they don't want to take you to Harlem. I grew up with that.

If my brother and I wanted money in our pockets, we had to get jobs - my first was at Burger King.

I don't want to be a supermodel. I want to be a role model.

Home shapes you. Make sure you shape it back.

When I got the role of amateur bank robber Cleo Sims in Set It Off, I sat down with my younger siblings and told them, 'Listen, I'm playing a gay character. Your classmates might tease you or say negative things about it,' but I'm doing it because I believe I can bring positive attention to the gay African-American community, and I believe that I can do a great job as an actor.' They understood, and when those things inevitably happened in school, they were OK with it.