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.

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.

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

Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice.

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

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.

School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come.

There was really way too much hotness going on back there.

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

O Jesus and Mary, let my entire consolation in this world be to love you and to suffer for sinners.

I despise mystics, they fancy themselves so deep, when they aren't even superficial.

Wherefore the heart and the diaphragm are particularly sensitive, they have nothing to do, however, with the operations of the understanding, but of all these the brain is the cause.

Even when I was in my 20s and at my most beautiful, I was never obsessed with my looks. I didn't dye my hair or wear make-up.

I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature. Some critics take issue with me because I make my points and discuss my ideas with jokes, rather than with oceanic tragedy.

A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it.

Money doesn't excite me - my ideas excite me.