Quotes from Jeffrey Wright

I'm not sure whether Los Angeles borders on the ocean or on oblivion. I always feel that I'm two steps away from the other side when I'm out there. It's more like a vacation place or a place to visit than a place to hunker down.

Well, I like to be kept on my toes. I look for a challenge. I don't like to recreate steps that I've already walked. I like to see if I can create something new.

I don't really consider myself a black man in Hollywood. I live in Brooklyn... and on purpose.

I find that the work I do as an actor that's most challenging commands an athleticism or, certainly, a physicality. And also a rigor, a physical rigor.

I don't mind that I am not necessarily a household name, because I think my characters have outshined me. That was by design. And I'm not wanting for appreciation.

The great thing about movies is that they're collaborative. And the worst thing is that they're collaborative.

I played football and lacrosse in high school. They wanted me to play football at Amherst, which I did not do because my schedule was full enough as it was. But over the course of my student days, I played pretty much every sport out there.

I think survival, with agency intact, is heroic for anyone or anything.

My first-ever job was when I was 14 or 15 in Washington, D.C., a job that I got through Marion Barry's summer-youth-employment program. It was working in the locker room of a public swimming pool, deep inside Anacostia in Southeast D.C., about five to 10 minutes from my house.

I was a political science major in college because that's where my head was.

When I think back on the work that I've been able to do and the work in my career of the highest quality, a huge portion of that has been on HBO. That didn't happen by accident.

As much as we teach our kids, the process teaches us. If we're being diligent, we're learning from our strengths as parents, but also from the mistakes that we make.

Well, I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good, everything's cool, and you don't necessarily want to know what's in it. The same thing holds true with movies.

I do have characters who are more well known than I am, which suits me fine.

Well, I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good, everything's cool, and you don't necessarily want to know what's in it. The same thing holds true with movies.

We really don't discover fully what 'Westworld' is for this first season, until we get there. The first 10 episodes are the journey. The colors become brighter, the vistas become clearer, and the history is more understood with each step we take along the way.

What I've learned in my career as an actor is that you're only as good as your collaborators. The process is many things, but it is wholly collaborative, particularly with something like 'Westworld,' which is a 10-episode-per-season gig, and we're just now on the 7th episode.

It's one thing to know your lines, another to be able to deliver them. The taste of the pudding is in the delivery.

That period, doing 'Angels in America' in '94 and then filming with 'Basquiat' in '95, those were gateway years for me as an artist. Two gateways, one into the film industry and one into the world of theater, each formative to me in different, equally essential ways.

I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can't do it. They don't have the chops.

Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It's seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part.

There are too many guns.

We have more guns in our country than citizens. I think we could with maybe 100 million fewer guns. And I think we'd be OK.

Out of the blue, I received this offer and invitation to be a part of this movie, 'The Good Dinosaur.' I turned to my Pixar experts, my kids, and asked them what this could all be about. Of course, they flipped out, and it was pretty obvious from their reaction that I was going to do this.