My ambition is to keep the audience guessing... that is my path to a long career.

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.

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.

The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

I've never done any advertising because I feel I am in a position of trust, and that has been very liberating

What you create doesn't have to be perfect.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Any program is only as good as it is useful.

The basis of democracy is tolerance to criticism. If you can't face criticism, if you can't accept it, then you cannot guard democracy, you are not eligible for it.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.