• "You can be on top of everything, and the next minute, you’re going to be on the bottom"
• "I do a movie once every four years and they call it a comeback."
• "I’ve never considered myself to be beautiful, and I still don’t. I grew up in a family where we weren’t allowed to talk about beauty or to put any emphasis on physical appearance. This whole beauty thing is something I’ve never comprehended. It doesn’t register or mean anything to me. As long as my arms and legs are working, as long as I have my sense of sight and sound, as long as I can just breathe, then that’s beautiful."
• "Some people expect me to walk into a room wearing platform shoes and a big 'fro and a halter top, saying, 'Get down, sucker!"
• "I'm at another level, where I want to act and submit screenplays and possibly direct. That's the uncharted, shark-infested water I want to dip myself into."
• The 5-foot-8 actress credits her strong sense of self to her mother. She once explained it this way: "I come from a long line of skillet-throwing women," she said. " I was telling women they didn't have to sit back and take anything from anybody."
• "Me, sexy? I’m just plain ol’ red beans and rice," she said. "Some day I want to play a grandmother. And a foxy one at that!"
• "We've got $20 million actresses today who are nude in Vanilla Sky, nude in Swordfish. So what did I do different? I got paid less, but that's it."