“As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.”

“Blackness is not a monolith. We are not homogenous people; we are not all the same.”

“Coming from New York, you're kind of indoctrinated with anti-L.A. sentiment, but California is just a really dope state.”

“I always find that really interesting, you know, when I get to see characters that I love in TV and film and theater around their family.”

“I don't check for Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly or any of these demons on the Right. They don't wake me up in the morning. I don't care about them, and they certainly don't drive the conversations I'm thinking about, but they do have an audience, and they do lie all day, every day about disenfranchised people.”

“I download, like, forty songs a day, I'm a big music collector and a big record collector.”

“I grew up in a really horrible school system, but my parents did not let that define how we function. They gave me more work at home from them than I ever got from school. To learn about the history of myself and my people, and that armors me.”

“I like to take credit for the work that I have done.”

“I thought that if acting didn't work out, I'd have done law school or medical school: probably law to be honest.”

“If someone says, 'Democracy is a sham, those people don't speak for me... the system's rigged,' you say, 'Vote.' Someone says, 'I was making a statement by not voting,' and then you say, 'Well I can't hear it.'”

“I'm always trying to find the next comedian that just gives me something a little funny to combine with all of the depressing news that I'm processing.”

“I'm an athletic junkie - I play in all the celebrity all-star games, and I've become buddies with a bunch of athletes.”

“I'm kind of in a middle space, being marketed as a biracial actor. Roles are written either stereotypically black, or they're written 'normal,' which is just code for white.”

“I'm very grateful and fully aware that 90 percent of actors are not working. Going from public school teacher to a show like 'Grey's Anatomy', I love what I do.”

“It was very important to me to be with a woman who is better than me at some things. You want someone who brings new, interesting things into your life.”

“Staying true to our goals, Question Bridge as a company and as a project is not singularly about black males. One of the things I'm so excited about Question Bridge is that my vision goes far beyond black males.”

“Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.”

“Storytelling is based on the word, being an honorable person of integrity is based on your word.”

“That's why the role that I have on 'Grey's Anatomy' is important to me, because it's a human being. He doesn't have to wear race on his sleeve; he doesn't even have to talk about it. We just lead by our actions.”

“The interesting thing about white power and the desperate white knuckling grip on this thing call whiteness, which is a myth in itself, is that black folks... we're not asking you to invent new laws for us. We're asking you to include us in the laws that are already on the books.”

“There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.”

“We as men, in particular black men, are constantly supported, nurtured, forgiven, apologized for, led, followed and coddled by black women, and they get very little in return.”

“We often grow up being told that we can do this or that, but if you don't see anybody that looks like you doing it, you don't believe you can do it. But I had great teachers, and I wanted to be a great teacher.”

“We should all have the opportunity to at least get a basic education and feel that you are worthy of something in life.”

“Words are only as good as the response to those words.”

“You have to be up-front from the very beginning about what your expectations of the other person are, and you can't make any promises you don't intend to keep.”