I'm actual thankful for the amount of responsibility that has been handed to me. I feel very honored.

I have a responsibility as a potential role model that I take very seriously.

I feel honored to have been a part of that dramatic change.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

It is television; we're making television at the end of the day. It's all smoke and mirrors, and it's all fake, but it's not, because it makes people really feel things that are real.

I remember when I got into Juilliard - which was just crazy to me, that I would be studying at a school like that - the choice to cut all my hair off was really symbolic for me.