A Quote by Queen Latifah

Sometimes when I am in a situation that I have never been in, I kind of pull back a little bit to observe things; it doesn't really last long though I have to. I've resigned to myself to the fact that I have to be me.
I myself am a person who has never resigned myself, who is absolutely never resigned, who can’t imagine it at all. I simply observe, and I observe in so many people, and often very quickly, a resignation that terrifies me, that’s it.
I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.
I never really thought about myself being in really big movies at all. In fact, I always though I'd do, I don't know, smaller movies is not quite the right word, but more character-oriented, dramatic things. I took myself a little bit seriously.
When you're on the set, and sometimes, because it's been so complex and the writers have been really writing, sometimes up until the last minute... And you kind of sit back; you separate yourself from your brain, and you say, let me see if you can do this. And that's the kind of challenge I like.
For me, it's never been an ego situation where I have been "I'm the boss; expletive you." It's always been a situation where someone comes to me and says "I can't tolerate working with you anymore" and I would admit sometimes I wouldn't blame them for that. But I also sometimes think I'm not that difficult to figure out. I don't really know what has driven people to be so angry and bitter - people like my old keyboard player Pogo, who I've known for such a long time. I feel bad for him, but there are grievances with everything.
To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.
I got the best of Rod. And I am fully aware that, even though I love listening to his stories of the crazy days, no relationship could really last then. I sometimes wish I could go back in time to the 1970s or 1980s, sit at a bar, and observe him, but I'm glad our time came when it did.
On the very last day of shooting [of The Last King of Scotlang], I remember wanting to get the [Idi Amin] character out of me right away, as much as I could. You literally take a bath to wash him off you. Luckily, I went into another part not so long afterwards, so I was kind of able to push it away a little bit. But speech patterns, and little sounds, particularly colloquial things, like the way you ask questions or might respond, were sticking with me, probably because I'd worked so hard to make it a part of my everyday way of expressing myself.
I'm still so grounded and so regimented, too. I've developed myself for such a long time - my characteristics and who I am - that if I try to change myself, my origins will pull me back.
I'm not quite that difficult, even though maybe I'm a little bit bossy. But you know, in order to get things done, you do have to be a little bit bossy sometimes or tell people what you really want. Otherwise, things just don't get done, do they?
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
The fact that I am not formally trained never really bothered me. There were times I knew it could have been a brownie point, had I been trained, but it never pulled me back.
I think the more you have a generalist perspective, I think sometimes the more you can kind of see through the forest and the trees. And when it gets a little bit cloudy, you know, have some sense of, "Well, maybe this might happen or maybe that might happen." So I really am a big believer in liberal arts education. I think it's better - particularly in these kind of uncertain times - to know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to being expert in one thing.
Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
I was lucky to spend so long on 'Blue Peter' and 'Newsround' and if you are a bit giddy, like I am, a bit daft, like I am, and you are the kind of person who makes lots of public mistakes, like I do, then it's sometimes hard for people to take me seriously.
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