It was not easy to get to where I am. My challenge is to learn to deal with the jokes that are common among men that I heard and continue to hear sometimes among men.

I am a focused person. I am a fighter.

I thank my mother, Terezinha, for the power of her transforming love.

We didn't have much money. My whole extended family used to help us, and buy us books and food. It was hard, and there were things I didn't want to talk about. But at the end I was a happy girl.

You can run, run, run away from a lot of things in life, but you can't run away from yourself. And the key to happiness is to understand and accept who you are.

I want to be able to make people laugh and cry and feel happy or sad and feel all these different emotions through singing and acting. Hopefully throughout my career, I'll get to pursue them.

I always laugh and say, 'Dudes, if I have to choose, I'm a political person first. I would never do another movie again and be completely happy.' I need to say how I feel.

It's wonderful to be able to have such wildly different projects in your body of work. They don't feel different to me as I'm working on them. It feels like they all share this element of subversiveness and finding the joy in subversiveness.