Actor Quotes

I've built an 8-track studio in my house that's virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record 'Houses of the Holy.' I'm interested in producing, but I'm mostly recording my own stuff.

I've been into music for a long time. I started playing drums when I was 8 and piano when I was 10, then bass and guitar when I was 18.

I'm remixing an R.E.M. track called 'I've Been High' from their last album, 'Reveal.' It's a beautiful song, but record execs didn't put it out as a single because it didn't sound like the R.E.M. we're used to. So I asked Michael Stipe if I could have the tapes to do a remix, and he agreed.

I was in Kansas for about a month, and we worked most of the time in a very small town, so it felt like the production basically took the whole town over. In a way, we were the Martians in Kansas.

I love seeing people having fun. Everyone over in L.A. is too cool for it. That's the problem.

I like both music and acting, and they both have a lot in common - timing, immediacy, stuff like that. But acting is more regimented. You wait around for hours, you don't get to write the script, you get hired. Music represents me better. I'm not acting; I'm just expressing myself.

I also couldn't pass up the opportunity to be in the same movie as Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close.

Balancing my film career and my music will be something I'm just going to have to deal with, as it happens. I think I can balance it out; the choices will probably be pretty clear. If there's a movie I just have to do, I will work the music around it.

A low budget is uncomfortable.

It's cool to play a sinister bad guy who also has a human side.

Well I don't know because I don't have a real relationship with the industry.

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions.

This country has always been run by elite, and it's an elitist democracy. And that's not a radical concept. It's elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don't talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day.

The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist.

Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

One of the main purveyors of violence in this world has been this country.

New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs

It's also important for those who promote those issues within the white community - the somewhat privileged community - to talk about issues affecting people of color.

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got invol

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

I've been a Goodwill Ambassador for the UNICEF and the UNICEF family for more than twelve years.

I've always been able to make choices that don't embarrass me.

I'm not so vain as to believe that my involvement changes anything whatsoever.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

I never thought about being an actor.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.