There's got to be something greater than us.

I got heavily into the drum-and-bass scene, which is really wicked.

The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

All India radio was worldwide.

There's got to be something greater than us.

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

It is important to keep your head up and follow what you believe is right.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

I had been working early in my life in films - since I was 11.

I think that I have sold out sometimes.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally.

Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I knew I was happy when I was dancing.

My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

The turntable is now an instrument at the Smithsonian.

I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

When you get to play with the big boys, your game improves drastically.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It is important to keep you head up and follow what you believe is right.

Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.

I have never been more proud of the United States than I am this year. We have elected an African-American president. We have the stellar Michelle Obama setting the standard for American women. I simply cannot say it enough: look how far we've come.

I wanted to win, even in practice.

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

I picked up an issue of Cosmopolitan the other day that had tips for job interviews, because I was like, 'I need to get better at interviews.' The article was basically about how to get someone not to hate you in 20 minutes. Every single thing they told you not to do, I was like, 'I do that every day.'

I owe it to my children to secure their future.

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

Usually I can go for three or four weeks and then I start to bake cakes or make jewellery and I think, 'hang on a minute, I'm obviously bored rigid. I need to get back out there.'

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

As you may know, I'm a native Texan. In fact I'm a fifth generation Texan.

Charlotte is a very interesting place - I'm Canadian, but I've lived in Toronto, Vancouver, and I've been living here in L.A. for years.

I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak - it's all there.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'

But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.

The heart of who I am as a person and as a man is forgiveness, after forgiving my father for a lot of things that were done when I was child.