“Woody Allen is really the ultimate. I love that he believed in himself enough to do what he did. And I have that same feeling - that there's nobody that looks like me in movies, nobody would cast me as a romantic lead, but I want to do it and I feel confident that I can.”

“Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.”

“People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.”

“I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.”

“One of my movies was called 'True Lies.' It's what the Democrats should have called their convention.”

“I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.”

“I never think it's right to chew gum in front of other people, but a lot of times I'll come in for a meeting chewing gum and I'll forget I'm chewing it. Then you don't want to swallow it because it stays in your system for seven years or something, so I've asked to throw it away. I've started to wonder if that's why I didn't get certain movies.”

“There's always an imbalance with actors and actresses in the industry. And I think because there are just fewer movies overall being made, it's that trickle down effect.”

“I'm fighting the label of 'Black' actress simply because it's very limiting in people's eyes, especially people who are making movies.”

“I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.”

“There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education.”

“I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.”

“I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.”

“Over the years with movies, I've given directors notes.”

“My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.”

“Too much TV hurts movies.”

“Audiences want to see intelligent movies.”

“I just knew that was what I wanted to do. I was going to perform as a singer I was going to perform as a dancer, and I was, you know, going to do movies and be an actress. I was going to do it or die trying. That's what my life was.”

“Back in the '70s, like one of my favorite movies ever was 'The Bad News Bears', and that was a kids' movie, but I don't think of it that way. I think of it as just a great movie because Walter Matthau was so funny and so harsh with those kids.”

“People go to the movies to watch a film and all they're thinking about is the actress's cellulite they saw in a magazine.”

“I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done, people still recite lines to me, even 20 years later.”