I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.

I was sometimes called 'coconut' when I was at school.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

If you merely focus on what we already know, then it's not revelatory. You may as well just go and watch a documentary or a few videos on Youtube, and you're good.

I don't have a tailor, but I do love clothes.

Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice.

Find the audience, be excellent, and you will be fine.

I truly believe that one of the things that has been lacking in the USA is a spirit of repentance about the injustices of slavery and the injustices of segregation and racism generally.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Considering that I'm British and I talk the way I do, I love it when a director takes a chance on me.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

You must write as if each word is a precious drop of blood, or a tear to be saved in a glass phial.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

People do not lack strength they lack will.

And I think if you're going to be with somebody, you owe it to them to show yourself.

That strategy of racing for the top five and racing for the win is where everybody wants to be.

I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am.

When I was a kid in Adelaide, I dreamed of becoming No. 1 in the world, winning a grand slam and the Davis Cup for Australia.

It's only by being obstinate that anything is got, or done.