Alfre Woodard Quotes

As an adult after college and as an artist I thought about what was real, what sustained me - it was Christian Science. I was using that when I didn't know it. Saying yes to the Light and your better instinct.

Everybody has a part of her body that she doesn't like, but I've stopped complaining about mine because I don't want to critique nature's handiwork ... My job is simply to allow the light to shine out of the masterpiece.

When you expect good, it's available constantly, and it makes itself a reality in your life.

When black women stick together, we are the most powerful force in the universe.

I am not getting any younger and am taking a new approach to life.

I identify myself as an actor, because I feel like you don't go to the doctress, you go to the doctor; it doesn't matter what the gender is. I think actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing. A separate category is another way of making us a special-interest group.

Even when I was saying I was Agnostic and trying to figure out my thoughts, I felt God was allowing me to do that.

A good writer - and I think it's this way with actors too - even if you have two lines, you have to do the same complete work as if you're number one on the call sheet. If you get in an elevator and somebody gets on, rides two floors and gets off, that person has a reality that goes back to when they were born. They have memories, they have people, they have a life. They are doing something right now that the camera is on them in their space. We live in our own close-up all the time.

I think people need to understand that with plays and with cinema, when you hear about it, call and get a ticket then or go and see it then. It's especially with the play, which I can do because it's a limited run.

When you feel a connection, a gut connection, a heart connection, it's a very special thing. What's familiar to everyone is watching people falling in love; it doesn't happen on screen that often. People fall in lust, then they're suddenly together.

Once our storyline gets under way, I just hope people don't throw cabbages at me in the market.

You very seldom see a picture where you watch the process of falling in love.

Does my character hate Bree? Well, let's just put it this way. Bree hasn't seen the last of me. I gave that drunk gal a ride home a few episodes ago and she turned on me!

Everyone has the impulse to be elite.

I rather go to see a good play than be in one.

I have always done what I wanted to do.

People live a lot freer in their body and their voices and their moves than people act onscreen.

The ones I love most are the people who the flaws show. I like doing characters that we see the total person. If people get afraid to show the flaws because they think, "Oh, then nobody will like them," then you end up with a lot of products, and everybody wants to be frigging heroic all the time - not what people are trapped in every day, like your skirt being in your panties after you walk out of the bathroom. Being human. Sometimes when people are drawn to your work, they're drawn because they recognize themselves or their loved ones or their neighbor in it.

And I communed with many different faiths and even when I wanted to be rebellious I never did not believe in Him. I never believed the people who said God was destructive or punishing.

I was like, wait a minute. When I hear my sisters' names, I want to have a joyful feeling in my heart about it.

After 9/11 and the impending actors' strike of a few years ago, roles dried up for everyone.

Americans have a hard time writing moms. I'll get a script and everything's really great and well-drawn, but the mom is like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of "mother." You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, and you could switch them around, and they'd be the same person. I think it's because most people don't really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite.

Television studios bet the farm on reality shows, where they didn't need any actors and movie studios had no plans for any quality movies that required the presence of me.

The Playtex Secrets survey truly uncovered some thought-provoking and provocative secrets of real American housewives. In fact, many of the findings would make great fodder for a storyline on the show!