Everyone may not go and buy a ticket to watch a movie, but everyone has a television at home. It definitely has a huge reach and a huge connect with the audience.

I have spent quite some time in Malaysia, as my mother is from there. And shooting there was a great experience.

The scariest thing about 'Roy' was that it was sync sound. So, I had to worry about my diction all the more along with my emotions, acting, and my dialogues. That was very challenging because it pushed me to work on my Hindi, and in a good way.

When I am in love, I am ridiculously and hopelessly romantic.

I wish actors got more credit for humour.

In comedy, if you don't have the right tuning with your co-actor, the humour can fall flat.

Bollywood is getting bigger and better.

I'm concentrating on my career, which is my top priority. The rest will follow eventually.

I am really excited about my next films, as I am working with big names like Salman and Ranbir.

Salman is genuinely a nice man who helps people. He is someone who I trust blindly. I think he has been an important person in my life.

What Salman and Sajid Nadiadwala have done for me is priceless. I'll do any film for them without a single question.

I think what happens is, people do just want to see you as a glamour doll that's put up on screen, but I guess it's how you see yourself.

I love the fact that Bollywood is getting so much more globalised. Instead of us looking out there, people are looking to India and coming to us!

Karan Malhotra is an amazing director, but he's strict.

I always wanted to play with my brothers, but they never let me and always bullied me. The bonding with my brothers happened only after we went our separate ways. That's when we understood the value of each other. Now, we talk a lot.

One of my brothers is a body builder, and the other is an accountant. Both of them live in Australia, so I rarely get to see them. My sister lives in the U.S.

I always seek one quality in my friends - that they should be genuine.

Being professional makes it easier for me to say no, be honest, and not feel bad about it. However, that doesn't mean that you stay aloof.

My brothers live in Australia and don't really know about Bollywood.

Marriage does figure in my life, as I do want to have children. But I could also consider having children without getting married. The primary thing is having a good father, a partner who could be there with me through that journey.

I would love to have children, as I am such a mommy. I have always been like that.

Since I was as young as I can remember, my dolls became my babies. I still have my teddy bear from childhood that I named Mama Bear because, actually, I wanted to be the mama.

Don't be afraid to admit what your dreams are.

Every time I watch someone's dedication, I get inspired.

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.

I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.

We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.

People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

If you have no road map, you have to create your own.

Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.

I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.