Oprah: Right.

Salma: And I say, "Well, this is not my dream, either. How scary!" After all this work. So what's my dream? I thought about this, and I wanted to do a different kind of movie. I wanted to have a voice, and it was okay if I wasn't going to be so famous or so rich. And this is one thing I learned: How do you recognize what's your true dream and what is the dream that you are dreaming for other people to love you?

Oprah: How?

Salma: The difference is very easy to understand. If you enjoy the process, it's your dream.

Oprah: Correct.

Salma: If you are enduring the process, just desperate for the result, it's somebody else's dream.

Oprah: You're absolutely brilliant!

Salma: I don't know how I figured this out, you know? I was miserable finding this out.

Oprah: What you're saying is so true. When I left Baltimore to go to Chicago, the whole talk show thing opened up for me. I had decided that I'm leaving no matter what because I've grown all I can grow here. I was an anchorwoman for the news, and it was a job that everybody else thought, "My God, you're an anchorwoman, you're making the money—what more do you want?" And I knew that if I didn't move from there, I would never grow to whatever the next possibility was.

Salma: And you didn't even know what that was yet.

Oprah: Yes—but I said, "I am getting out of here." And I was okay if I never had that again. There's a level of you that has to be okay no matter how things turn out, because the universe doesn't work with desperation.

Salma: It doesn't.

Oprah: If you're desperate, it means too much to you.

Salma: And that was me—I became desperate! I was doing everything I was told I had to do to get the things I wanted, and it wasn't happening. I was not getting this movie or that movie, and there was a lot of rejection.

Oprah: Weren't you once told that your accent would remind moviegoers of their housekeepers?

Salma: Yes!