I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and now my kids are growing up in Los Angeles, so that's culturally very different.

As a kid growing up St. Louis, Missouri, I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood. Any time people talked about slavery, it was always something like, 'If I was a slave, I wouldn't have been putting up with that. I would have been out in a heartbeat.' And it's like, sure, it's a very easy thing to say.

Sarah Paulson is the most prepared and professional actor I've had the privilege of working with. I learned so much about preparation and attention to detail and speaking up when something is not right.

I think what Hollywood is learning at large is that there is profitability in stories that are culturally specific and that you can only address the universal through the specific.

Other actors are not my concern, and that's their life and that's their journey. Everybody has to get to a point in their own time and their own way.

I'd heard about rehab, where you send people with drug problems, but I soon learned that there's no standard definition of it; instead it's a generic word for a wide variety of treatments, including some that are outrageous. Past-life therapy? Exorcism?

The older that we get and the different stages we go through in life, it seems like we become different people. But I think that the truth is you are always the same person. You just discover these new things about yourself.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.