Top 33 Jeffrey Wright Quotes

It’s one thing to know your lines, another to be able to deliver them. The taste of the pudding is in the delivery.

I do a little Reddit, yeah! I pop in every now and again.

I think survival, with agency intact, is heroic for anyone or anything.

The great thing about movies is that they’re collaborative. And the worst thing is that they’re collaborative.

Well, I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good, everything’s cool, and you don’t necessarily want to know what’s in it. The same thing holds true with movies.

When I think back on the work that I’ve been able to do and the work in my career of the highest quality, a huge portion of that has been on HBO. That didn’t happen by accident.

I took a class in college… I think we were reading some short Chekhov plays, and I knew the first day of the class that I was going to be an actor. It was just the bizarrest thing, but it just felt like home.

I, Jeffrey Wright, the actor, actually signed on to the ‘Westworld’ Delos website. My profile came back as a Libertine, which is probably reasonably accurate.

There are too many guns.

Some of my earliest heroes were congresswomen like Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan.

I do have characters who are more well known than I am, which suits me fine.

We have more guns in our country than citizens. I think we could with maybe 100 million fewer guns. And I think we’d be OK.

Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It’s seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part.

That period, doing ‘Angels in America’ in ’94 and then filming with ‘Basquiat’ in ’95, those were gateway years for me as an artist. Two gateways, one into the film industry and one into the world of theater, each formative to me in different, equally essential ways.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry – except that he wasn’t as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

From an animation perspective, it doesn’t get better than Pixar. You’re working so much in the blind because the huge circle of collaborators that’s required to pull off a film like this means that you are just one small arc in that large circle. The level of trust that you have to give into is significant.

I played football and lacrosse in high school. They wanted me to play football at Amherst, which I did not do because my schedule was full enough as it was. But over the course of my student days, I played pretty much every sport out there.

When I started off as an actor, the last thing I wanted to do in the world was make money. I was under the impression, when I started off as an actor, that the more money I made, the more it would diminish from my creativity and my capacity to be an artist.

I’m gonna be on the Hawaiian beaches when I’m old.

One of the first things I do when I step onto a set is I scan the set and try to take in every detail, because what I’m trying to find are tools that I can use to incorporate myself into the space and tools that I can use to make the performance authentic and to build on the authenticity of that.

If a director can’t figure out what they might get from me or whether he or she wants to work with me based on what I’ve done, then I can’t tell them anything more than what they don’t know already.

For me, an actor is a person who makes characters like a cobbler makes shoes.

Comedy’s all math, figuring out the timing.

We really don’t discover fully what ‘Westworld’ is for this first season, until we get there. The first 10 episodes are the journey. The colors become brighter, the vistas become clearer, and the history is more understood with each step we take along the way.

Collaboration is a multilane highway, going in all directions. If there isn’t reciprocity, it fails, and it’s unsatisfying.

I find that the work I do as an actor that’s most challenging commands an athleticism or, certainly, a physicality. And also a rigor, a physical rigor.

My mom used to take me to the theater to see the tours that would come through D.C., and I loved it. I loved it. I was absolutely enthralled by the theater and by that world.

Our great nation put a man on the moon, but it can’t train its cops to distinguish between an ordinary brown-skinned brother and a criminal.

I think I was afraid of what I might say when I got onto someone’s stage or in front of someone’s camera.

In theater, the primary tool for me was voice. On-screen, it’s the eyes.

Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests.

I was a political science major in college because that’s where my head was.

I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can’t do it. They don’t have the chops.