I got out of the Army – in my world – I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.
Love was just a word to me. Until you came along and gave it meaning.
Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn’t cut it.
I love doing commercials! Usually, they have enough money that they can take time and photograph it well.
Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn’t know what to do with us.
Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn’t have the anxiety that we’d starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know.
The one constant in life is baseball.
I don’t ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I’m not a romantic really.
Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
Once you begin to explain or excuse...
You weren’t going to the theatre to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
We used to be “shiftless and lazy,” now we’re “fearsome and awesome.” I think the black man should take pride in that.
I do not know if it is true that all actors want to direct and all directors want to act, but in 1972 I tried directing and decided I had better stick to acting.
I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle ’60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater – which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.
One day, my youngest uncle – the other one who was first to go to college, Randy – and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up – he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.
I think stutterers are funny. And I know it’s rude and politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. But I think it is okay because I know why they’re funny. They make people nervous. People think, when on earth are they going to get the word out, so they start laughing out of their own nervousness.
A man’s got to take care of his family. You live in my house, you sleep your behind on my bedclothes, you put my food in your belly because you are my son; you are my flesh and blood, not because I like you. It is my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you.