Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race..

Love was just a word to me. Until you came along and gave it meaning..

In our resolve to build a better world... we seek to summon what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature..

No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement..

My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic - and I think psychotic - way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is som….

My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college..

So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years cont….

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond..

Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European peo….

My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, a….

One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. H….

The last thing I want to be is a rich black superstar. I just want to act..

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to sha….

In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia..

Love is just love, it can never be explained..

Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it..

It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don’t acknowledge that family is important and it has to be p….

Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine..

More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather..

I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really..

So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department..