I can't fake emotion.

I'm an artist at heart.

Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

We are not apathetic in this country.

Art is art, and journalism is journalism.

My philosophy is to live below your means.

You either get better, or you don't progress.

I grew up studying music. I went to conservatory.

Growing up, I never imagined I would be an actor.

Kids - black kids - are forced to grow up too soon.

You can't be a bad boy without somebody scolding you.

I started acting almost on a whim to help my music career.

I started acting, almost on a whim to help my music career.

Don't be a victim; if you want to make movies, make movies.

In the Land of Truth, my friend, the man with one fact is King.

I want to do work of meaning that speaks to a greater depth of who I am.

Nothing will ever top 'The Wire.' It was historical. It was black cinema.

When you're in a high-stress situation, dynamics between people can change.

At the end of the day, you have to find the humanity in you in each character.

As a black man, so often you grow up suppressing your emotions and sensitivity.

For me, that is the craft of acting: literally creating something from nothing.

The African American community is so under-served in the entertainment industry.

Go is no Erlang, Smalltalk or Scheme, nothing pure. But it works great and is fun!

I mean, you know actors, we always want to do something else, something different.

As an actor, we spend so much putting the mask on and trying to be someone you're not.

My father graduated from high school and didn't go to college and still found his way.

If you're going to come at me, come at me respectfully, and I will respond respectfully.

Some people build fences to keep people out; some people build fences to keep people in.

Notes are tricky in an audition, because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right.

I mean, of course, I love sci-fi and stuff like that, but I'm not, like, a comic book crazy guy.

Go isn't functional, it's pragmatical. Why pure paradigms like FP or OOP are always a must? (sigh)

Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans.

Most of the characters I'd played were so different from me, so far from me that I had to transform.

I can only speak as an American, but most journalism here isn't doing its job any more. It's about selling stuff.

In a lot of work places, you work at a lot of jobs and people work more with their colleagues than with their family.

Acting is a privilege, and I'm exceedingly blessed to be able to do what I do. At the end of the day, it's all entertainment.

'Pigeonholed' isn't the right word, because I feel like I've had a very wide range of characters that I've been allowed to play.

In drama school, my greatest strength was my range. So my early career was like that: I played all kinds of different characters.

I want authenticity. And rarely do actors - more specifically, black actors - get a chance to be authentic on film and television.

I subscribe to the slow nickel theory. You take a little bit at a time. You always make better of what you have when you don't have best.

Sometimes you have to say, "No. This is my space." If you're going to come at me, come at me respectfully, and I will respond respectfully.

Because of the way tech is changing, and becoming cheaper and user-friendly, it's becoming easier to make films cheaply, maintaining quality.

I was never unhappy with the shows. I didn't get into [the writing]. I had an area. My area was my character. My area was what they gave me to do.

'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.

There is so much stimuli coming at young people, you don't even have time to grieve before something new happens. We are desensitized to the issues.

It's funny, because in drama school, my greatest strength was my range. So my early career was like that: I played all kinds of different characters.

I'm not a pacifist, but I'm not a violent person. I mean, I have a gun. I shoot guns, but I wouldn't say I love guns. It doesn't work that way for me.

I started to realize, a lot of times if you go into your memory, your sense memory, you know more than you think you do, from having watched and listened.

From the time I became an actor my whole approach was to try to do as many different things as possible. It never occurred to me that I might be typecast.

You don't see a lot of black rock stars. The music industry tends to be segregated stylistically. It's hard for a black artist to cross over to rock music.

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