Today's talk about Oprah Winfrey's decision to wrap up her syndicated talk show in 2011 is bringing back memories of a conversation I had with her 11 years ago on that very topic. We were in her elegant but modest office at Harpo Studios in Chicago, steps away from where her shows are taped, and though she was game to talk about anything, it was her coming movie Beloved most on her mind. She confessed that when she went to Philadelphia to shoot that movie in 1997 — she produced and starred as a haunted former slave — she had decided to quit the talk show. She was tired of talk, she told me, and wanted to focus on films.  But midway through the three-month shoot she had an epiphany. After an agonizing scene with her co-star Danny Glover, she said, "I thought, 'How dare I think that I could be tired? Who am I to even say the words 'I am tired'? I thought, 'You come from a people with no voice, no money, no power, no vision, no vehicle for themselves and their children. You've been given this.' " So she decided to continue and it was that fall of 1998 that she abandoned the sensational and announced her new TV mission — helping people improve their lives.

In that same interview, she said something I remember often: "Everything is about imagery. We're people who respond to imagery. You need to see something different so you can feel something different." Oprah is more of a national institution now than she was that summer she decided that she was meant to use her voice and vision on television.  She has spent all of her adult life on TV. And while I understand that — as she said — "it feels right in my bones and it feels right in my spirit," to wrap it up after 25 years, the woman  now has her own network. I think it's a pretty safe bet that she'll be back.

Photo courtesy of Harpo