“I was raised in a sort of village. I have a huge family, and I think there is strength in that. It helped me to deal with some of the complications of living in the South because I always felt like I belonged, no matter what.”

Nobody has to give me permission to write.

They should probably have a James Brown aerobic tape. You would lose a lot of weight.

When you play characters, you shouldn’t just be putting on their characteristics – you should be finding it inside yourself.

You’re not free unless you can show the good and the bad, all sides of them. So to me, when I play a character, it’s important that I can show every aspect of them.

I try to look at every role the same way, regardless of whether the character is real or the character is a fantasy. I always start from myself, because you have to know yourself first.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people – to black people.

I’m an artist. Artists don’t need permission to work. Regardless of whether I’m acting or not, I write. I write when I’m tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.

I’m not afraid to work.

When it comes down to it, I’d rather have an action figure than a Golden Globe.

A superhero movie is only as great as its villains.

I would love to have an ocean of love right now. That said, the number-one rule of acting is, ‘Do not seek approval from the audience.’ People don’t realize that. You can’t do stuff to get applause. You have to live in the truth.

As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven’t been told.

People don’t want to experience change; they just want to wake up, and it’s different.

Colonialism is the cousin of slavery.

The only difference between a hero and the villain is that the villain chooses to use that power in a way that is selfish and hurts other people.

You have to cherish things in a different way when you know the clock is ticking, you are under pressure.

Directing is monumentally complicated and it’s a function of all the time you pay to it. I think it would be great to do a movie I’m not in, I could just eat Fritos and just say, ‘yeah, it’s good!’ Some day.

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer

The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.