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.

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.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.