Aja Naomi King

I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.

A man can get my attention by smiling at me and then coming over and talking to me. The best way to get a girl's attention is to start a conversation.

Create something for yourself that you feel proud of, that you are in control of, that gives you a better understanding of the type of artist you want to be.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

By high school, I was telling everyone, 'Oh, I'm going to be a doctor when I grow up,' because my dad was always saying to me, 'Pick a career path where you're always going to be necessary.' But by junior year, I was president of choir, I was the lead in the school play, and I just loved being onstage performing.

Strength doesn't mean an absence of pain.

I use Pureology Shampoo and Conditioner, and after shampooing, I'll put the conditioner on, go watch a movie, and wash it out later. When you have black girl hair, once we wash, we've gotta do the whole press and get in the edges and everything. That's a lot of heat to go back to straight on a daily basis.

Back when people couldn't read, other people would take newspapers and turn them into theater so that people would know what was going on in the world. That is a powerful thing.

Television has embraced so much in terms of storytelling and in terms of a wide array of characters conveying stories from different points of view.

Diversity is such an interesting word. I feel like when people hear the word 'diversity,' they think that it means only people of color, when in reality, diversity is all-inclusive; it means everyone.

There are people who do what they believe is right, but as they say, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'

I'm obsessed with eyeliner - the darker and kohl-ier, the better.