Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whatever is on the page is what I'm married to. I'm very prepared. I'm a thespian. I don't like to improv. I don't like to go off course 'cause I think that's where stuff happens. When you stick to the material 'cause it's written so well, that's where the magic happens.
What you find I think in the mystical strain of Catholicism is that you're put in relationship with God, and you have many opportunities not only of talking with God in petitionary prayer, but also of listening to God, being attentive to God, as happens in contemplation.
Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.
I don't see how people are comfortable with seeing other people be great. You can be happy for anybody, but what is your excuse to not want to be great? These people are great because they just say, 'I'ma do that,' and they do it. That's it. There's no scientifical process.
When you're coming up with new material, it's not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it's working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You're constantly rebuilding.
I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It's good that the person I'm being onstage isn't really an act. It's really me.
People don't want drama 365 days a year. I'm a sense of relief; it's my job to take your mind off what's bad for that brief second you're in the room with me, regardless of shape, race, colour or anything. It brings people together, and it makes me feel good about what I'm doing.
My show 'The Big House' was picked up; they flew me to New York. I'm about to step on stage to announce 's 'The Big House.' And a hand grabs my shoulder, 'Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.' It's a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can't.
I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray.
Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it'll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.
My kids are coming up in a different time then me. Interracial couples are of the norm. With me, it's about making sure my kids understand the importance of education and having opportunities that I didn't. My goal as a parent is to make sure they don't take what they have for granted.
I am in control of my career, and that's what so many actors don't take advantage of. You get to these successful points, and you continue to just work for other people. But, when you're your own brand and you're your own boss, the whole line of work changes. That's my biggest turn on.
I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That's how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it's a release, for lack of a better word.
My show 'The Big House' was picked up; they flew me to New York. I'm about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart's 'The Big House.' And a hand grabs my shoulder, 'Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.' It's a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can't.
For me, it's about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That's what's big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I'm in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.
Every relationship should eventually become a long-term relationship. Any director that I meet now isn't just a director. He's potentially a friend, and someone I can call to do a project that I want or that I have. That's what I mean when I say branding and developing yourself, as a business.
At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you're going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.
I've done a great job at being universal in my stand-up, which is why, for 'Let Me Explain,' I toured all over the world. These movies I have coming out - 'Ride Along,' 'Grudge Match,' 'About Last Night,' 'Think Like a Man Too' - are putting me in a position to become universal on an even bigger scale.
When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.
The same thing I did in 2013 is what I'm trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I'll have another hour of stand-up material where I'll be able to go on the road and tour again.
As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they're in the kitchen cooking. So it's understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.
Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.
So unless we form some kind of adequate relationship to death, we're never going to live properly, and if we think of it purely as a medical thing, we have reduced life. We should think of it as some sort of mystery which we can participate in now, not something to be pushed off to one side till the last moments.
In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, 'Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn't understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn't fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn't want it to get any worse. You're the mother of my kids - I don't want to hate you.'
I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes. However, I don't think I'm as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people - which is why I think I did so well.
You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don't want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don't want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.
When I got into the business of entertainment, I did it for a reason. I didn't do it to not be successful. I did it to be successful. And to hopefully get to the highest level that I possibly could. Thus far, I'm achieving those goals. That doesn't make you stop. That doesn't make you complacent. It makes you want to do more.
Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.
The quote-unquote 'description' of a leading man was once your tall, handsome man with the build of whatever, almost a trophy to some degree. I think now it's about making a leading man what you want a leading man to be. In this day, you can't deny talent. You look at Jonah Hill, you look at Zach Galifianakis, you look at myself.
I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing.
My road to success was a long road to success was a long road. You get out of something what you put into it. I put blood, sweat and tears into stand-up comedy and the entertainment realm in general. For me to just know be coming around is a blessing. It's a blessing and it's an honor. It makes me say I can get more and I can do more.
There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us. I never looked back there, but she was like, 'Will you all just shut up!' And I just got up and moved three rows in front. She was like, 'What are you doing?!' I was like, 'You better get up here! I don't play the fighting games.'
Divine love, agape, is self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very, very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.
When you're in these movie deals and the studios are talking, they're putting business deals and packages together, but they're making calls based on previous relationships. They go, "Oh, let's call this actor because we did this with him, and he might like him. Does he like him? Let's piece them together." There's a brain behind that puzzle, and I want to be the brain.
We don't always possess faith in the sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith. Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the intellect in order to have faith.
Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.
Ever argue with a female and, in the middle of the argument, you no longer feel safe because of her actions? She may start pacing back and forth real fast, breathing out her nose. You know what my girl do? When she get mad, she start talking in the third person. That's scary as hell because that's her way of telling me that from this point on, she is not responsible for none of her actions.
In marriage for example, you say 'Yes' on the day you get married, 'I do', but each day you implicitly if not explicitly, also say 'Yes', by every act that one performs in a marriage, one is saying 'Yes', making a cup of coffee for one's wife or husband is a form of saying 'Yes' to the marriage vow that one is continuing the marriage by affirming it in one's deeds. And exactly the same in the religious life.
The kind of love that God has for us, I think, is of an infinite longing for union, and the kind of love that God wants us to have for him, I think, is of this also endless longing. Now in eros we lose ourselves. I think erotic love transforms us, but it does so only momentarily. It has to be embedded in something much longer, a much bigger narrative called marriage or durable relationship or something like that.
Sometimes when you hear so much and everybody is praising you, you can get lost in that. You can start thinking that you are on a higher pedestal than everyone else. So I try to stay level headed, humble and the best way to do that is to not really acknowledge it that much. I just keep grinding and working as hard as I can. I also set my goals higher so that I don't have time to be content with my place in life and in my career.
I don't have to change anything. I think that's the secret to comedy. You want to be universal and appeal to everyone. You want to put yourself in a position that no matter what you're talking about, everyone can relate to it and understand it, because it's an experience that everyone can go through. That's what I pattern my writing material and jokes after. I'm trying to maintain a level of realness that my fans can appreciate.
I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.
I never thought in a million years that I'd ever sell out back-to-back shows at The Garden. That's not to say, I never expected my career to take off. Still, it was a "Pinch Me, Wake Me Up" moment. I was like, "Wow! I can't believe this. That I'm actually here, and this is actually happening." And in that moment, when I was about to thank my fans for supporting me, I noticed that they were standing up clapping. It was overwhelming, and became a very emotional moment when I tried to thank them.
I think what happens in a religious life is that we have those experiences of affirmation and that one starts to live a Christian life or a Jewish life or a Muslim life or a Buddhist life, by affirming that affirmation each day. Each day you say 'Yes' to that Yes. So the life of being a Christian for example, is always a life of double affirmation, that you each day say 'Yes' to those counter-experiences of saying 'Yes', even when you're not experiencing them at that time, you're remaining loyal to that experience.
The relationship we have with God is not the same over a life; sometimes, as with human relationships, it goes through bad patches and sometimes it becomes very intense. It is a terrifying thing to have a relationship with one's creator, to spend one's life so that one is trying to converge with one's creator seems an extraordinarily difficult and sublime thing. But at the same time it's extremely simple. One of the things which perpetually amazes me is that at any moment or any day, anyone who is alive can talk with the creator of the cosmos.
When I was in my early 20s I converted to Catholicism after a long period of searching. What I think drew me to the Catholic church is that in Catholicism, prayer suffuses all of one's life by virtue of the sacraments. Prayer is not something which occurs just on Sunday, it doesn't occur only at particular moments of intensity or by particular conventions, one's whole life is given up to prayer in many, many modes. And so everything to do with the faith is trying to put you in relationship with God and trying to make that relationship grow deeper and more mature.
There seems to be something poetically that doesn't work or is limiting when you call God 'God' in a poem. When I tried to be honest with myself in my relationship with God, Christ is, on the one hand, completely dark, he's transcendent and unknown. On the other hand, he is completely imminent and completely knowable as Jesus. Our tradition speaks of him in both ways as transcendent but also as a lover who comes to us, and the two word 'Dark One' seem to me to contain both things, the transcendence and otherness of Christ, but also like a kind of dark lover who comes to us.
Catholicism is the big house of Christianity. It's got many, many rooms in it. And I've always been attracted to the rooms which are to do with prayer. The mystical strain is the strain whereby the whole day can be given over to prayer through what we call lectio divina, prayerful reading of Scripture, through practice of meditation of when one uses the imagination and the intellect with respect to images, and then finally, and most difficult of all, contemplation, where one empties the mind of all images and all ideas, all concepts, in order to be completely attentive to God.