“Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.”

“Family's first, and that's what matters most. We realize that our love goes deeper than the tennis game.”

“While I have felt lonely many times in my life, the oddest feeling of all was after my mother, Lucille, died. My father had already died, but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely, yet I did.”

“If you live in a ghetto and really want not to just change your life and your family's life but change your ghetto's life, make your ghetto a good neighbourhood, learn science try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.”

“Santa Barbara is my hood. I mean, it's not much of a hood, but it is definitely like my hood. I claim Santa Barbara like I claim my family. I'm going to be married and buried there.”

“When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food... but I also grew up with a Greek family when other kids were eating fried okra, we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.”

“It takes a lot of work to put together a marriage, to put together a family and a home.”

“My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.”

“I grew up in a family that was multifaceted, sexually oriented, and pretty much open to everything. And because I was working, my friends were all adults. I had a tough time going to different schools because people knew me from films and I was the fat child who got beaten up every day.”