“I think having the opportunity to get inside the skin of people that operate outside the law and normal moral and ethical restraints, and then to go home afterwards leaving them on set, is pretty cathartic.”

I get to play out all kinds of bad behavior without anyone actually coming to harm.

For me, if the writing and – by extension – the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn’t matter if it’s film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.

I like people and I like hearing their stories. The way that they deliver them is always very particular and I think that their accents are integral to that.

There’s something special about being on film sets; there’s an excitement; the people in every department are passionate about what they do.

As a younger actor coming up, I wanted to be in films.

[Playing] the bad guys tend to be fascinating. Figuring out what makes them do the things they do is what interests me.

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

An unpeaceful mind cannot operate normally.

Vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.

Here’s how I operate. When I see something I like, 20 years later, I ask her brother for her phone number. She don’t even see me coming.