Open The Curtains

Whenever a character scares me, then that means, Taraji, it's your job to make the people empathize with her.  It's your job to find the why or the how she became this girl.

The thing about acting is it's so seductive.  You get drawn into something and it's like... a love affair.  There's something really alive about it and you feel great and it's physical and it's all these things, and then you remember why you were doing it to begin with, and that it can still seduce you after 40 years.

If it doesn't shake me up, then why am I doing it? I'm not servicing the character or the fans if I just walk through it.  that's not what I got in this industry to do.  Art is so powerful...and if we do it well, if we handle it well, then it's going to force people to have conversations that they are afraid to have, and that's what art is supposed to do, in my opinion.

What I discovered, in the process, is it makes you become more empathetic because you have to enter someone else's reality.  And so you learn to see through many other people's eyes.

If I hadn't found it, I wouldn't have ever been able to make sense of all these bizarre things that I'm sure we all had when we were kids, why if I think something, do I feel it?  When you're young, before you're acting, that just makes you feel crazy.  Now I have an outlet and I understand what it is, otherwise I would have felt mentally insane.

It's a bit like asking why you love somebody; you know you do.  For me, it's a vocation and in the end, I feel like I didn't choose it, it chose me.

I think I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination...and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling.

At a certain point, you think, I've been pretending for decades now.  And that's what I love most about it, is that you are still childlike in that way of make believe.

The great thing about playing a real life character is you don't have to make up all that back story stuff.  Truth is always so much more interesting than fiction, isn't it?

People fascinate me.  Their bodies, their brains, their emotions, their ideals, their histories, their choices, and their dreams.  Their stories.  It all comes back to stories.  Everything everywhere is ultimately a story.

The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.

Remember, you must participate in the world you want to become apart of...keep up with whats causing chaos in your field.  Watch every movie that gets a negative review in the New York Times and figure out what they did wrong. Read, read, watch people on the street. Spy. Be nosy.  Eavesdrop.

Contemporary arts job is to wreck what came before.

Great art poses questions, and the more questions it poses the better it is.

I think human beings are really interesting.  To me that's the whole point of theatre.  The whole point of theatre is us being able to look at a story, or listen to a song, or see something on stage and us feel less alone as human beings, to feel connected to other people.  And the best theatre does that, the best theatre has universal themes in it and makes you feel connected to humanity.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

Storytelling is a human need.  Not just once upon a time as kids, it's a thousand year old tradition...it's how we learn about who we are.