Quotes from Lenny Henry

I failed my 11-plus and ended up working in a factory after I left school. But then I passed my audition on 'New Faces' and I was on the telly. Suddenly, I was living in London, and sending my parents money that they could never have imagined. It was a massive thing for me; I was a 17-year-old kid who was able to support his family!

I believe that if we want to change our industry we must look beyond what we see on our TV screens and fix the bigger problems lying beneath. When it comes to racial diversity that means looking at who commissions and makes the programmes.

If you work all the time, you don't have many life experiences to feed back into your work.

I read 'Fences' when I was about 30 and I thought: This is too sad.' But you get older and you start to go, 'Yeah, yeah, this is like life, why wouldn't I want to do it?'

I haven't got an exact number for my carbon footprint although if it's anywhere near my normal footprint it'll be size 13 wide.

It is wrong if nearly every time we hear a black or Asian actor portraying their lives they are actually speaking the words of someone who has never experienced their reality. And to effectively silence disabled people from telling their own truth on film or TV is close to criminal and will not help wider society understand their reality.

That's where depression hits you most - your home life. It doesn't affect your work. I can't do this zany, wacky, funny thing any more. I haven't been like that for a long time.

My mum was a fixed point in my universe who was never going to grow old or die; she was always going to be there. And when she got sick, I was on the road all the time, I wasn't at home much, there was a lot of pressure. It was an awful time, and when she died, it was like your world falls apart.

Quotas are often about quantity and not quality. I think people should get jobs because they are qualified and they can prove they are good at the job.

Life is about overcoming self-doubt. But you don't grow if you don't question yourself.

I wish I'd seen Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Rainbow in 1977.

Wouldn't it be great, if there was a one-stop shop where funny people could take their ideas and have them made?

BAME kids get discouraged - too many glass ceilings to break through.

When I was younger, I was very thick-skinned - my skin is actually getting thinner as I get older.

I never asked to be compared to Richard Pryor. I just realised he was one of the greatest humorists we'd ever had on earth, I knew I wanted to be like that.

It was weird being a kid in the Midlands where outside everybody is white and speaks in a certain way but when you go home nobody speaks that way and everybody looks like you. Every day was this weird threshold crossing.

Mum would hit us with anything. You'd see her looking for something to hit you with, and you'd think, please let it be something reasonably soft. She threw a chair at me once. It was like being in a western.

Now, although I'm a mimic and I've got a reasonable ear, being a character isn't about an ear. It's about the whole person.

My family recycles paper and bottles, but I reckon a proper wormery for the garden compost would be the way to go.

I got accused of misrepresenting all people of colour in Great Britain. I would get told off a lot. 'How can you do African characters when you're not African?' But I gave it a go. Maybe if there had been more of us I could have just been Lenny Henry from the Black Country with Jamaican parents.

Comedy is a way of hiding - especially character comedy.

I listen to lots of blues records and some of them are funny. BB King's 'How Blue Can You Get' is hilarious.

I worked at the BBC for 35 years before I had a meeting with anyone who looks like me. The only people like me were cleaning the corridors, and that is not right.

Shakespeare is for everybody, not just for toffs with a cauliflower down their tights.