Yara Shahidi

“I am all about comfort and whatever comes along with comfort. I wear a lot of sweats. But I'm also very preppy naturally.”

“I really love acting, but I also really want to be a historian, so it's really confusing.”

“I know, ultimately, I want to help effect change; otherwise, I would look at myself in the mirror every day and think, 'What in the world am I doing with my life?'”

“Being homeschooled for half of my life allowed me to choose my own curriculum and find things I really enjoy, and that's kind of inspired me. I've always been intrigued in or interested in the topics I've been covering.”

“When you're biracial, you can feel like you're fully neither, not fully both. But I won't strip away my heritage for anyone's comfort.”

“I remember my first actual intense breakout was when I was 13, and I no clue what to do because I hadn't dealt with anything in that large of a scale ever before.”

“I feel comfortable putting my political stances out there without feeling as though I am filling some sort of quota. I don't have a wokeness quota for the day.”

“'First Family' on the CW is about the president and his family living in the White House.”

“Maintaining a sense of your personality grounds you in your space. I try and just make what I wear a reflection of how I feel at that moment, at that particular place in time.”

“Fashion is one of those places in which, when you're wearing something that feels like a representation of you, it does create, in a matter of speaking, a space for you to exist. Even if it's just in a two-inch radius of where you are. It's a walking, personalized area in which you can live.”

“Never jeopardize who you are for a role. Now, I'm not saying you should never change for a role, because the fun of being different characters is adapting different nuances and different parts of the character, but never jeopardize your moral compass or anything like that to have a role.”

“When we moved to L.A., I started going out for more commercials, and then one day they emailed me a movie script. The first thing I said was, 'No way. I love commercials.'”

“I've been shy twice. Once when I saw Matthew Bomer and once when I saw Adam Levine. I couldn't say anything, literally.”

“The more you learn about someone, how could you not want to protect them and their rights? The more you learn about a culture or a certain identity, it's hard to not feel empathy.”

“Gender is a spectrum.”

“At Harvard, I got to meet and have dinner with Jamaica Kincaid. Just to have conversations with professors was absolutely amazing.”

“There have been moments when I was on a modeling job, and it was the most fantastic thing in the world. And there have been moments where I've realized, 'Okay, I'm ten years old, and I've spent the past six hours outside in the rain.' It taught me how to be specific about what kinds of projects I wanted to do and what kind of work I wanted to do.”

“My friends always laugh because I'm the kind of person who bought the Brooks Brothers school skirt, even though it's not my school's uniform skirt, but just because I liked it. I'm a knee-high socks kind of person.”

“Personally, getting into college was a big deal because I realized it's probably one of the only things I've fully planned. The rest of my life has been, for the most part, a nice little happy accident. I'm glad that it happened this way, but it's nonetheless unintentional.”

“I have the support of my parents and my teachers. They made it very possible for me to go to a school that is open and supportive of me being gone at times and pursuing acting. But school always comes first for me.”