Let's say black, the whole black religious experience, here, is very impressive to me, because when I first arrived I realized that people carry their faith with so much pride.

We're very open and outspoken about our faith and our beliefs. We also talk about our doubts, our moments of insecurities. We talk about it all day, how we're inspired by God. We recognize little miracles every day, and that's how we're raising our daughter.

You can be very independent, but admit to wanting somebody close to you and that's what me and my wife have. We don't need each other but we want to be with each other and I think it's important to educate the kids with that.

Secular artists see themselves with performance; they are more self involved, presentational.

Yet, that's what studios do. If one thing works, they'll keep doing it till it runs its course and people aren't interested anymore.

I had to study acting to basically educate myself.

Some of the best actors in the world are very exterior actors, Anthony Hopkins being one of them. He knows exactly how to turn his face to get a certain expression. He knows exactly what to do with eyes, and with his voice. It's very exterior.

Let's say black, the whole black religious experience, here, is very impressive to me, because when I first arrived I realized that people carry their faith with so much pride.

I went back and researched the history of gospel; where it came from, slavery times, communicating with each other without their master knowing what they are saying, and that gospel artists view themselves differently.

The Southern Baptist Church is a specific culture in itself. So, I had to study, talk to people, watch tape and go to performances to see how Gospel artists move compared to secular artists.

I'm in the booth and first of all, I'm from Germany and I had never heard a gospel in my life.

The whole time I was modeling, I had a place in Paris, and a place in New York, and I was really single.

I was looking to show people I could act. I was looking for something that would take me away from the whole hunk riding off into the sunset thing that people wanted me to play after Brown Sugar.

I knew immediately that she was going to be in my life forever. I didn't know in what capacity, but I knew that I had found someone who was going to be close to me for a long time. We became great friends fast.

Yet I wanted to have children, and I knew that was my purpose, but I wasn't going to settle.

I just didn't know who was going to be my partner. I knew that once I had grown to be a man that I was going to attract the person that I deserved to be with, or deserved to be with me.

As part of my relationship with my wife and my daughter, and we share everything and talk about everything.

We have relationships and know the exact outcome with that person because we don't deal with ourselves and don't deal with our issues and end up being attracted to the same person or the person is attracted to our energy.

I don't care if you are religious or not and I think the message is that at the end of the day, everybody has to mature and everybody has to heal and mend their own injuries, emotional injuries, on their own pace.

Don't ignore the past, but deal with it, on your own pace. Once you deal with it, you are free of it; and you are free to embrace your life and be a happy loving person because if you don't, the past will come back to haunt and keep coming back to haunt you.

I love the fact that we, as black people, carry our faith with us. We share it and embrace it and love it and talk about it because we talk about everything else and why not that and that was the first impression that I had that really touched me.

There was a certain point in my life where I had to decide that I was going to take my future and Nicole's and not wallow in what happened to me because when you do that, you just keep repeating what's been happening and at some point you have to make a choice.

Sometimes in the black culture, being raised as an independent woman is misconstrued as someone who doesn't need a man. I think that's wrong. I think we all need someone.

I know I can act and it doesn't matter where you come from.

Gospel artists are messengers; they are vessels of a message.

Everybody goes through obstacles and problems and issues and turn their backs on people that we are fond of and love just because we hurt; and everybody goes through that.

My love for you is past the mind beyond my heart and into my soul.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.