So often when Black men have to play roles on TV, we're either the noble savage or we're completely a savage, and there's no nuance.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

I think it’s intoxicating when somebody is so unapologetically who they are.

I understand what's it like to work all week and on Friday night just want to go and leave your brain at the door, buy some popcorn and be thrilled by something.

Every time I've learned something, I've realized there are a hundred more things I don't know about the thing I just learned.

Living by example - that's always a better teacher than trying to preach.

Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.

It's important to keep the people who know you well around you. It helps center you.

We're really trying to give people the ability to go into a darkened room and have a couple hours of just pure enjoyment.

When I'm the person in front of the microphone, and I'm the person in the light, I want to reflect and refract the light onto places where they need the attention, where I don't need it.

If you look up and no one who's around you has been around you for the past 20 years, and they're all new people, I think that's a problem.

It is not power that corrupts but fear.

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.

Will you come with me?""Ah, Kestrel, that's something you never need to ask.

I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

There's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.

During that time, I began writing and designing the propaganda that we distributed to the students who we were trying to convince to join us.

We want to bring enterprise back to blighted urban areas. People there have been told nothing is ever going to change. The policy makers may feel the same way.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.