Often when I meet people and say I'm a designer, they say, 'Oh, a fashion designer.' Which is not a bad thing I suppose, a bit groovy.
I don't size up their grades or their board scores. Because in America today, that's just an advantage certain people have. I size up the give and take, the speed of thinking, what I perceive as ambition. I say, 'Tell me about your high school jobs.' And I love people who worked in coffee shops who were waiters and waitresses.
I've got girlfriends who call me 'Raye' or 'L. Raye', but when somebody calls me 'Lisa', it's like, 'You've got two more times to say that and then I think you're disrespecting me and I'm going to have to cut you!'
For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.
When I was in the indies, the guys would be like, 'Ugh, a women's match. I'm not gonna watch that.' And to come back here, at every single Live Event to have a guy come up to you and say, 'That was amazing,' I feel so accomplished.
I have no hesitation to say that St. Louis is a great place in which to live and work.
I used to like John McCain, too, but I must admit that was because he was bucking his party to do things I agreed with. I would not have had that reaction if, say, Bernie Sanders decided to rebel out of principle and support privatizing Social Security.
I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it's an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.
My grandmother, she's been the positive portion of my life the entire time. She raised us Baptist, and when I got old enough to say I didn't want to go to church, she didn't force me. She was cool.
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
Kanye's the best listener I've ever worked with. If I interrupt Kanye, every single time, he'll wait for me to finish before speaking. It's a running joke - sometimes I interrupt him just to see. And he always goes, 'No, no, finish. I want to hear what you have to say.'
All those things they say about a baby changing your perspective - it does!
Once you start getting big roles as an actor, everything pays. So what are you making decisions on? It's about the director or the script or whatever. But before you reach that point, you're taking jobs with, say, a theater company, in spite of the fact that it's not paying your bills.
I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.
I am compelled to continuously see the bright side. It is in my DNA. My kids look at me and say: 'Mom, you're so happy!' And I do feel happy. I feel joyful inside. I can't explain it.
People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.
I wasn't obsessed by magic. People say, 'How you can you claim you practiced eight hours a day and weren't obsessed?' Well, people go to a job they don't even like for eight hours a day; it's not obsessive if it's something you like.
I knew there would be a negative reaction in the press to my divorce, but I am not going to live my life because of something someone might say.
Truth be told, I hear stories every day that would make you say, 'If you put that in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.' Real life really is kinda incredible; the stories from people's actual lives defy credibility. People's lives are messy, humans are messy, and they're flawed.
I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.
Broadway is the same as Hollywood. Every few years we say we reached the mountaintop, then we take two steps back.
I don't want to live in a world where I could say to my daughter, 'There used to be turtles that swam in the ocean.'
I always say a tremendous amount of healing is in your own hands.
It's wrong, and it's racist, and it's bigoted to say that guns are quintessentially American.
I'll say this: I'm not so sure 'The Jetsons' had it so wrong.
What I try to do is that when I'm at home, I'm at home. We're working hard at putting away our devices and not taking calls. Sometimes, you have to, but I'll say, 'Look guys, I've got to take this call, but when I'm done, I'm all yours. I just need 20 minutes.'
We in New York were very poor in the depths of the Depression - but I must say, that was the best time of my life.
There is no fact-checking on tertiary celebrities. You can say whatever you'd like, and it will just rise up again.
I don't want to say work is who I am, but some people feel more centered and more whole when they're producing and creating.
I just wanted to kind of break down those gender stereotypes and just say everyone's equal, everyone's their own person, everyone's their own individual.
Psychologists say don't expect your life to be happy all the time. I go with the philosophy that every day can't be tops. Life is not like that - it's up and down.
To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.
I've gotten to work with amazing people. I would say usually we get to a point before we get into the studio where there isn't that sense of anxiety or nervousness of who they are because I don't think it would be as productive in the studio if that was the case. But maybe meeting someone like Neil Young for the first time made me anxious.
If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.
I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people.
I can say that when you model,when you get to a certain age, that's it for you. I remember there was a time where I was like, 'What am I going to do with my life?' I am a high school dropout who's only modeled. So there was desperation with that.
