I don't have a tailor, but I do love clothes.

I was sometimes called 'coconut' when I was at school.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

If you merely focus on what we already know, then it's not revelatory. You may as well just go and watch a documentary or a few videos on Youtube, and you're good.

Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice.

Find the audience, be excellent, and you will be fine.

I truly believe that one of the things that has been lacking in the USA is a spirit of repentance about the injustices of slavery and the injustices of segregation and racism generally.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Considering that I'm British and I talk the way I do, I love it when a director takes a chance on me.

There's a nimble quality to the way a television actor can work. When that muscle gets strong it's a very valuable thing.

Truth will screw with you every which way, before it lets you to be anywhere near itself.

In life, you have 3 choices. Give up, give in, or give it your all.

I couldn't possibly have played someone with feelings towards a woman unless I had those feelings myself.

But nothing in life was set in stone and nothing in life is promised us. Not happiness, not joy, not love. Everything was variable and mutable and inconstant.

Performing was easy because I believed that I could sing, but that was an outside thing.

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

I trust Life. I know it brings me everything that I need at the perfect time and in the perfect way.

If people around you aren't going anywhere, if their dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the corner, or if they're dragging you down, get rid of them.

Young kids are doing the same thing I did, but they're doing it differently. They don't do brain surgery the way they used to do it either.

Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.