“I think the most stressful time of my life was when I was in New York, and I didn’t have money to pay my rent.”

In television you don’t have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it’s even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

When you’re doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.

People have said, ‘You don’t need to do any more biopics. You don’t need to play any more real people.’ I don’t agree with that.

I’m not really interested in being a superhero. That’s not a box I’ve been trying to check off.

Baseball players need strength but also the ability to make fast-paced, explosive movements, so their training is all about strengthening the tendons around the bone and the joint so you don’t tear the muscles from the bones.

I got scars from every film I’ve done, every TV show.

Guys are natural problem solvers – they like to have strategies.

We live in a world where people can ridicule you at the push of the button. They can question you at the push of a button.

Our lives depend on vote.

You think you can’t change the world? You can.

One of the first things I was taught as an actor was, ‘Don’t judge the character.’

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.

It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.

Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here and to raise this country full of grown people.

Why, in a country of free speech, are there phone bills?

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

Our country has often stood like a solid rock in the face of common danger, and there is a deep underlying unity which runs like a golden thread through all our seeming diversity.

I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit had chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.

It breaks my heart to know so many children in our country do not have access to education.