My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It's kind of flipped, and I'm not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.
We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.
The trouble with most of our prayers is that we give them as if we were picking up the phone and ordering groceries - we place our order and hang up.
Growing up in Jamaica, the Pentecostal church wasn't that fiery thing you might think. It was very British, very proper. Hymns. No dancing. Very quiet. Very fundamental.
Radicalism is as British as tea and cakes, as much a part of our make-up as monarchy and football. It will never have its own jubilees, palaces or honours system.
I didn't really grow up on hip-hop. Ella Fitzgerald and the old school jazz divas are more my comfort zone.
I've always sung. I was really into musical theater when I was growing up. As a kid, I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, actually, on cassette tapes.
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
I've worked with a lot of really fine actors, both on stage and on screen. The level of their game lifts me up and brings the level of my game up to theirs. Always. It's like a constant upgrade.
There is a certain inescapable attachment. If you are born somewhere and circumstances don't take you away from it, then you grow up and remain within it.
If you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians, you can't put up posters and have politicians come down.
I knew I wanted to be an actor when I was growing up, really. So when I decided to go to university instead of drama school, it was with the intention of becoming an actor afterwards.
If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.
When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue.
I was so tiny when my parents split up that I can't remember them ever being together. That was never an issue, as I guess I never went through the trauma of them splitting up.
I was brought up in a way that when you're at a dinner party, you don't grab a chip unless it's been offered to everyone else. It's the manners of being brought up by English parents.
I can sleep anywhere! I can come off stage during the interval of a play, lie down for four minutes then wake up feeling better.
Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate ?
Once you grow up life is like a washing machine. One must always secretly have a Peter Pan mojo to feel young.
I would just like my children to be able to eat fish when they grow up. Now, I don't think there's anything controversial about that.
Both politicians and journalists face situations which strain their honesty and humanity. My opinion is that politicians on the average stand up somewhat better than journalists.
