If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.
Everybody has their own style. If you went to the movies every week and everybody acted the same way Tom Cruise did, boy, wouldn't that suck?
You're being cast for your acting ability. It's not based on the way your body functions. If you're playing a lead in a movie, it's for that character and they'll tailor it to you. In a dance company, you have to fit in a definite mold.
Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.
I said, going into acting, 'I'm never moving to L.A.,' because it scared me. But there was no way you could build an acting career in Orange County.
I've always been in school plays and performing monologues and taking drama. Now I'm in acting classes. I do it the real way. I want to be a working actor. I would love that. I just like being on a series and having a script, and I want that to be my nine-to-five.
I always wanted to be a film-maker when I was younger, not an actor. I was an eight-year-old who dreamed of being a writer on 'The Simpsons,' which was a weird dream to have. But I started taking acting classes as a way to learn how to direct actors and I sort of fell in love with it.
Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.
I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.
Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains - daisy chains - of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between 'his,' 'her' or 'their' wish and yours.
People assume that 'The Expendables' is old school, but it's only old school because that's the way I know how to make an action film. It's pretty real.
You get dinged for wanting to do a comedy, then wanting to do a big-budget action film, and then wanting to do an indie. But you can't let other people trying to label you get in the way of trying to do something artistically.
In a lot of action films, a lot of guys are driving muscle cars or vintage cars, whereas in reality, a lot of getaway drivers would actually choose, like, commuter cars and find a way to blend into freeway traffic as quickly as possible.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
The way to activate the seeds of your creation is by making choices about the results you want to create. When you make a choice, you activate vast human energies and resources, which otherwise go untapped.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
I think Selena Gomez seems like one of the coolest people ever. And she's, like, an activist as well, and clearly she loves love and is a loving person. I don't know if it's clear because I don't know her, but it feels that way.
Sometimes, I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way, much like everyone else.
