Top 44 Kerry Washington Quotes

You see the transformation that the arts have on young people. It changes their lives for the better. That’s where my engagement is.

I come from a family with a really strong work ethic – not just my parents, but my aunts, uncles and cousins. It rubbed off on me. I have a cousin in The Bronx who says I’m like the longshoreman of actors. I am a worker.

When you buy into the cultural idea of what’s acceptable and unacceptable, you reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices. That wouldn’t work for me. I don’t love to give advice to anyone, because we all have to make our own choices, but I’d want to live my life in truth.

Being the one woman in the room should not be seen as a victory. If there’s only one of us in the room, we’re still a token; we don’t actually have an empowered voice. If there’s two of us, we’re still a minority. If there’s three, then we’re allowed to have a multiplicity of opinions.

I would wear pajamas to work every day if it were up to me.

I think as more women are in positions of power, more people of color are in positions of power, the stories become more inclusive; the casts become more inclusive.

Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to health care. We the people can’t let that happen.

I’ve never been comfortable being a pawn. I work with brands where I feel like I can have my say and companies that I’m proud to be in a relationship with. Partnerships take a lot of time. If I am going to put my name and my face and my energy behind something, I want it to be authentic.

You may not be thinking about politics, but politics is thinking about you.

I’ve had friends of mine say, like, they’re tired of ‘gayface,’ and I was like, ‘What’s gayface?’ They were like, ‘It’s the gay version of blackface: like, come in and be more effeminate.’

I just really love producing. I love being able to be part of a solution. I love being able to create opportunities for other people to do what they do, to be part of the collaborative process that is filmmaking and television making.

I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don’t think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

I’m here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!

You know what’s funny is that I have this ongoing relationship with the city of Washington D.C. I went to George Washington University, and my nickname was K-Dub – based on G-Dub – and I’m now on the board of trustees at George Washington University.

I feel like any single woman of color who’s been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from ‘For Colored Girls.’ It’s just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.

My mother is one of seven kids, so I have a lot of strong women in my family, and I have supportive, beautiful relationships with all of them.

There are a lot of forms of exercise where you have to leave yourself out of the room while you force yourself to do this thing. With Pilates, I get to bring my true self. I cry, I laugh. I get to go, ‘Where is my body today? What do I need today? How can I take care of myself and push myself past my comfort zone?’

I’m a person who’s always been politically active and passionate about people’s rights.

Before ‘Scandal,’ I was actually cast in two other pilots. Both went to series, but I was fired and recast. For both, it was because they wanted me to sound more ‘girlfriend,’ more like ‘hood,’ more ‘urban.’

I don’t think I consciously say, ‘What would Olivia Pope do?’ but there’s a new thread of belief in my own capacity that I think comes from her. She makes it happen. She figures it out. She fixes it.

I’ve been wanting to produce for some time because I want to have more creative control over the things that I do and not be victim to the whims of other people’s desires.

I think Calvin is so beautiful. Oscar De La Renta is so classic. I really like the Rodarte girl; they are super-inventive, and they think outside the box. I am all over the place!

I always felt like my value was much more in my intellect than it was in my appearance, and so that’s what I spent time cultivating. And some of that I get from my mother, some of that comes from the schools that I went to, and some of that comes from probably insecurity.

I’m always working. My cousins call me the longshoreman of actors.

I have girlfriends in this business who talk about their personal lives, and it works for them, and I love it. But not for me.

When I think about any of the missteps in my life that I’ve made, all of which I’m grateful for, it’s because I just so wanted to be truly seen and heard for who I am and was afraid I wasn’t or wouldn’t be.

I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living, I also think it’s really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society.

Shoes define how you walk in the world and how you stand: like, what is your posture in life?

As a young girl, my real dream was to be the woman in the shows at SeaWorld.

I have an amazing social media manager, Allison Peters, who is one of my closest friends since childhood.

I really try to let my friends into all of my life. They know that Red-Carpet Kerry is a version of Kerry, and they know that DNC Speaker Kerry is me.

I’ve always been a writer because I’ve always been a student. My mom’s a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

I really gravitate toward having all different styles in my closet because I feel like I always want to dress to fit my mood or where I am going. I do love Jason Wu; he is also a really good friend of mine, and I love what he is doing for Hugo Boss these days.

I didn’t grow up thinking I was pretty; there was always a prettier girl than me. So I learned to be smart and tried to be funny and develop the inside of me, because I felt like that’s what I had.

That’s what acting is – it’s about… having the courage to allow your audience into the private moments of your characters’ lives.

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.

I wouldn’t just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother’s creative solution – to put me in workshops and classes and children’s theatre programmes.

I was really lucky because I went to an all-girl school, and that single-sex education really helped me because I really learned to bond with women and to not compete with or compare myself as much because we were all allowed to be ourselves and be unique and kind of have our unique strengths.

I come from the theater and I plan to always do theater. So I don’t really see myself not being able to act even if people don’t think I am sexy enough for film at 40, I’ll still be acting.

Earlier in my career, I was much more super-sharey. There were moments when I wanted to process things that were happening to me more privately, and I didn’t have the space to do it, because once you let people in, they’re in, and you don’t get to say, ‘Oh, I want this for myself.’

Making the unbelievable believable is different on a set with ‘Fantastic Four,’ where it’s like, ‘Wind machines! Because the airship is coming in and you’re pretending to be afraid!’

I come from film, where I only play a character for three months at a time, and then it’s done, so it’s important for me to be able to put on other hats and make sure that all of the tools in my toolbox that don’t apply to Olivia Pope are still in shape.

I have to make sure that I don’t silence myself about the things that I believe in, because sometimes the fear creeps in of ‘What if fewer people watch the show or fewer people hire me because I express my politics?’ For me, the commitment is to never be quiet just because I’m in the public eye.

I don’t talk about my personal life in the press; that’s how I kept my wedding a secret.