Quotes from Laurence Fishburne

The commercial I did for Kia was hilarious and unexpected, so that, I think, is also another way of signaling to the audience that there's more to me than Morpheus.

When you're on screen with Mads, there's some real fireworks because your character is his intellectual equal. In a way, maybe your character has an instinct as to who this man really is.

Do mainstream crowds want to watch a movie about good things happening in black neighborhoods? Do black audiences want to see a little girl doing something in a white world?

Acting and philanthropy are braided together. I've tried to seek out things that speak not just specifically to the community that created me, but that speak in a way that's universal and all of humanity celebrates.

Hiding a talent is not exclusive to any one particular group of people: young, old, black, white, Latin. It doesn't matter. It's universal. The idea that you have a gift or talent is always kind of threatening.

I've been around long enough now and have learned to be flexible enough to know that every movie isn't going to be 'Apocalypse Now,' and every director doesn't have to be Stanley Kubrick.

Some people think of me as an actor and some as a movie star, so I sort of guess that makes me both. I love making movies, and I love playing on the stage.

I certainly believe that being in contact with one's spirit and nurturing one's spirit is as important as nurturing one's body and mind.

I try to stay in shape a little bit, but I don't obsess about it.

I believe in my children. I believe in human beings. I believe in the goodness that is in human beings. I believe in many, many things that I cannot prove. I believe that there's the world of the seen and the world of the unseen.

I've played a lot of bad guys, 'cause that was the only work I could get. People saw my face and went 'oooh'.

I see that I have, as part of my stock in trade, a very regal personality and carriage. I see that I have a kind of strength, a kind of command, and a kind of power that one would associated with a monarch.

After 'Othello,' it was, like, 'I can stop acting. I have played one of the great characters in the English language. I feel I have played him well and honorably. I have nothing to prove anymore.'

I think any city that does the Olympics takes on the world and has to grow and has to kind of assimilate all sorts of folks.

If you're playing a real person, then you want to do a certain amount of research, but that's only going to be so useful to you. Each role requires a different kind of approach to get ready.

I don't think Othello is a jealous man - he is a man who has been deceived by another person, just as everybody in the play is deceived by that person... The playwright uses the word 'jealousy' over and over and over again, but I don't think it has anything to do with being jealous.

I wouldn't say that going into a weekly television series is actually stepping away from anything. It's another medium in which to work as an actor.

It's always a collective group of people coming together to oppose those things which are fundamentally contrary to our basic humanity.

In order to be the best version of yourself, you have to dedicate time, effort, and support to other people who need it.

I was in a movie with Marlon Brando. Now, I didn't have any scenes with Marlon Brando, but I had scenes with Martin Sheen and was around Dennis Hopper, who was a child actor in the studio system and was enamored of James Dean, as was Martin, and they were all sort of disciples of Brando.

I learned tolerance at a very early age.

'The Fugitive Kind,' 'Rope,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' - I watched all these as a way of reminding myself that you can do a movie based on a play. You can do a movie that stays in one place for a long stretch.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

It's funny, a lot of people think I take myself seriously because I come off so serious sometimes. But it's not that I take myself seriously, I take what I do seriously.