“I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”

I like the blues a lot. I grew up on it.

I don’t have to work. I could stop and never have to worry about paying the rent. I’m working for the joy of doing it.

Actors cannot work against each other. It’s totally impossible.

Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.

Give me something interesting to play and I’m happy.

People need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies.

That’s your job as the actor, to understand the human part of the character, to make it real.

The better the actor, usually the safer you feel working with.

The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.

Acting means living, it’s all I do and all I’m good at. If I weren’t getting paid well, I would still be acting in a small troupe somewhere.

The accident was a horrible thing – but that horrible thing made Chris, at the end of his life, Superman. It’s a happy irony if there is such a thing. I’m proud to have known him.

If you want to see a miracle, be the miracle.

I’m not one for blaspheming, but that one made me laugh.

Attacking people with disabilities is the lowest display of power I can think of.

You don’t know how much you appreciate your privacy until you don’t have it.

We all have our own insecurities.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else’s eyes, it’s like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop–you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!

One lady told me that before she saw ‘Sounder’ she didn’t believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.

A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.