I think about my dwindling anonymity, and that's really scary because a very large part of me would be perfectly happy living on a ranch in Colorado and having babies and chickens and horses - which I will do anyway.
It's easier for me to go to Russia and train with top coaches and choreographers there than go to Colorado Springs and train with 14 of my competitors.
I'm trying to be global and trying to push us, as a society, to becoming colorblind, and so I'm very grateful to ABC for casting me in 'Quantico.' It was based on my merit, not on my ethnicity.
The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?
The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling because when I was a little girl I remember the horror of the East St. Louis race riot.
I'm like, 'I think I'm just going to wear what makes me happy,' so I'm just really big on wearing things that reflect my personality, like colorful hats and weird shoes and things that I just think are fun.
I have this complex that if I walk into a place wearing a colorful shirt someone will stop me and say, 'I'm sorry, but the Latin band comes through the other door.'
I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know.
I think that when people look at me, and they look at my height and my voice and my coloring, they automatically think, 'Tough.'
I was a top-notch cartoon model for Hanna Barbera, and they made me into a cartoon series called 'Devlin,' which ran for seven years, and I was on lunch pails and coloring books and all of that. It's really interesting being a coloring book when you're young - most kids colored in coloring books, but I made money off coloring books.
'Khoobsurat' was an eye-opener in many ways. Cinema is a colossal money-churning business in India, and working in that environment offered me quite an incredible learning experience.
I feel very responsible for young models of colour. They come to me and tell me they're not getting jobs, and I do what I can to speak up for them.
At heart I've always been a music fan. That part of me has never changed since I was a little kid, sitting in a room watching a record go round, looking at the colour of the labels.
I go to castings and see several black and Asian girls, then I get to the show and look around there's just me and maybe one other coloured face.
I was my mom's oldest child, so she was like, watching closely and taking notes, like, 'Okay, this is what she gravitates towards,' and she gave me all the tools to keep me focused. I liked to write; she got me notebooks. I wanted to draw; she got me sketch books and crayons and coloured pencils.
Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings.
My family could only afford to get me the box of eight Crayola crayons, but I craved the one with all 24 colours. I wanted magenta and turquoise and silver and gold.
India appeals to everybody. For me personally, I always felt like we would come here when we wanted to embrace all colours. I don't mean racially, but literally; just all the colours of the world.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'
