Yvonne Orji

“I'm grounded in who I am.”

“I don't look at God as some boring dude in the sky that tells me what to do all day. I legitimately be like, 'Yo, you know what, G, that's crazy how that happened. That's dope. You know, you the real MVP.'”

“Before 'Insecure,' I was a wedding emcee - a host for weddings. That's a world that a lot of people are not familiar with.”

“New York is a walking city, so you'll be dressed to the nines, and you'll go out, and you feel more special and more pretty because more people acknowledge you.”

“A lot of times, especially in the black community, where therapy is talked about, it's like, 'Just go to church.'”

“I don't even know anyone who hasn't watched 'Sex and the City.' If you didn't, we can't be friends.”

“Any show that speaks to people of color feels the burden to never mess up, never make its characters look bad - to always get it right.”

“I was looking around this room, this sea of industry folk. If I had have worn black and white, somebody would have asked me to get them a cocktail; the only other people of colour there were servers.”

“Sometimes you have to experience things for yourself to learn the lessons that you need to learn.”

“By the time I got to George Washington University, I had been a straight-A student in high school.”

“If you're a woman of colour and you have any level of education, you have to adapt.”

“You can't tell me no, because you can't tell Jesus no. It doesn't work.”

“For me, staying ready has always been, like, the preparations: do the behind-the-scenes or do what you think that's not sexy that nobody will see, but when they do see it, it's like, 'Oh, snap... what she's doing on her own, we'll add to that, and it'll blow up.'”

“I think there is this narrative that if you are a black woman, and you are strong, and you are educated, it's like, 'Good luck getting a black man.'”

“On TV, as in life, white folks are allowed to make mistakes, but usually, black people aren't.”

“As for my role models... you know, I'm an immigrant, so we didn't grow up with too much TV. My parents were like, 'You must read your books.'”

“There's not one black narrative. There's not one way to be black.”

“I have a saying: Nigerians don't fit in second place. Everything we do we go hard.”

“It's great for people to give out of the kindness of their hearts, but because we're in a consumerist society, it's also great to have the opportunity to give and get.”

“When something is not great, I'm not going to eat it. It's not enough to just get full. It's like, how does this make you feel?”