Top 60 Laurence Fishburne Quotes

My company, Cinema Gypsy, produced a podcast, ‘Bronzeville,’ in conjunction with Larenz Tate and his brothers that we’re developing into a television show. It deals with a very tight-knit African-American community in Chicago in 1947 and people who run a numbers wheel.

It’s a huge blessing to know you’ve done something that has affected people the way ‘The Matrix’ has. It’s like, there’s ‘Star Wars,’ and then there’s ‘The Matrix.’ It’s cool to be a part of that.

I believe in my children. I believe in human beings. I believe in the goodness that is in human beings. I believe in many, many things that I cannot prove. I believe that there’s the world of the seen and the world of the unseen.

All I know is, I’m trying to do things that are a little different whenever I can.

As a man of colour, I’ve spent my life asking people to see me for who I am. With Obama in the White House, it feels like people have finally caught up to where I’ve been most of my life.

As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.

If you’re playing a real person, then you want to do a certain amount of research, but that’s only going to be so useful to you. Each role requires a different kind of approach to get ready.

If you asked someone who was a Maori about how they felt about how they were treated in Australia or New Zealand, you’ll get an answer. They’ll have something to tell you. And you might not like what you hear.

I work with my instincts. I don’t have a process that I learned in an acting class whereby I break a script down or whereby I do a certain kind of research.

I can’t remember a picture that has expressed black attitudes and personal relationships as vividly as we’ve done in ‘Cadence.’

I can’t imagine not coming back to the theater. It’s where I started.

I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the ’70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.

I really don’t know that I’m iconic. I don’t even know that people think I’m cool.

My mother is quite a woman. She would push me, and when I got tired of her pushing, I’d say: ‘Leave me alone. Don’t push so much.’

I think any city that does the Olympics takes on the world and has to grow and has to kind of assimilate all sorts of folks.

People think my name is Morpheus. Many times, people will say to me, ‘Morpheus!’ and I will complete the sentence by saying, ‘is not my name!’

Some characters need to be more performance-orientated; some, you have to be still.

I’ve played a lot of bad guys, ’cause that was the only work I could get. People saw my face and went ‘oooh’.

I try to stay in shape a little bit, but I don’t obsess about it.

Obviously, after ‘The Matrix,’ it was a case of, ‘OK, I did that. What’s next?’ I mean, it’s always like that, but more so this time. How do I change it up? How do I keep it interesting for myself?

Philanthropic work reminds you of everyone’s common humanity, and that’s really the common denominator for everyone.

I don’t necessarily go out and try to do something that’s going to be just something that will please the audience. I’m not interested in doing something where I get the most people to come see the movie at the same time and they get the biggest explosion. I’m not interested in that.

Shooting a film with seven to eight actors together is complicated sometimes because you have to cover everybody.

We are three dimensional beings: body, mind, spirit.

I certainly believe that being in contact with one’s spirit and nurturing one’s spirit is as important as nurturing one’s body and mind. We are three dimensional beings: body, mind, spirit.

On a motorcycle, you can’t really think about more than where you are. There’s a freedom that comes with that – from stress, worry, sweating the small stuff.

Things have become considerably better for men of colour since I was born. But I’d say that we’ll be really getting somewhere when things get better for women of colour.

We are our children’s first teachers.

You know, whatever happens between the two of us that’s created when we come together as actors is not something I think we can explain.

It’s always a collective group of people coming together to oppose those things which are fundamentally contrary to our basic humanity.

When I was ten, I did a play at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, Charles Fuller’s first play. He went on to write ‘A Soldier’s Story,’ among other things. I realized, ‘Oh, I can be anything doing this.’

Mine were informal mentors. They were all in my working life.

When I came into my adulthood, I recognized how fortunate I was to be doing what I loved to do.

I don’t think Othello is a jealous man – he is a man who has been deceived by another person, just as everybody in the play is deceived by that person… The playwright uses the word ‘jealousy’ over and over and over again, but I don’t think it has anything to do with being jealous.

I certainly believe that being in contact with one’s spirit and nurturing one’s spirit is as important as nurturing one’s body and mind.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Anytime we’re talking about Thurgood Marshall, that’s a good thing, I think, because it gives us an opportunity to go back, look at the history, and recognize what his contributions were.

The commercial I did for Kia was hilarious and unexpected, so that, I think, is also another way of signaling to the audience that there’s more to me than Morpheus.

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

I have a man cave somewhere in California – a totally undisclosed location where manly things occur. There are motorcycles, there are secret doors and passageways. Women are welcome, but they must knock.

It’s my luck that I was born a bit of an old soul, and it’s served me well.

I carry a lot of feminine energy as well as masculine energy, and that’s the hit that people are getting. That vulnerable thing is not what we assume with black males. You get it, and then they cease to become scary. They become human. You cease to have a bogeyman.

The 50s are the age of elegance. That’s kind of my intention when I get dressed: casual elegance.

It’s important for a lot of young black males to value swagger over intelligence. Swagger is important, but intelligence must come before the swagger.

There’s great theatre in New York City, but no New York City in theatre.

Hiding a talent is not exclusive to any one particular group of people: young, old, black, white, Latin. It doesn’t matter. It’s universal. The idea that you have a gift or talent is always kind of threatening.

I was in a movie with Marlon Brando. Now, I didn’t have any scenes with Marlon Brando, but I had scenes with Martin Sheen and was around Dennis Hopper, who was a child actor in the studio system and was enamored of James Dean, as was Martin, and they were all sort of disciples of Brando.

I didn’t want to be a big star. I wanted to be a really good actor.

I don’t ever get to the point where anything is old hat.

‘The Fugitive Kind,’ ‘Rope,’ ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ – I watched all these as a way of reminding myself that you can do a movie based on a play. You can do a movie that stays in one place for a long stretch.

John Wick is not a guy that asks for help, so when he goes to somebody for help, whoever that is, you know he’s a serious cat.

When I think of Othello, I think of a poet-warrior. Let me say that again – a romantic warrior. And I think I have those qualities in common with him.

You can’t go looking for another one of those franchises. You only ever get one of those. You get ‘Stars Wars’; you get ‘Indiana Jones’ or get ‘The Matrix.’ I’ve had my franchise.

I didn’t have much of a childhood, but that’s O.K. I have a livelihood.

My production company, what we are trying to do is I’m trying to create content that speaks to me, and it’s not one color. It’s not one size fits all.

What I continue to learn as a parent is to be mindful of the fact that I am responsible for being the parent that my children need me to be and not necessarily the parent I want to be.

A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that’s on them, not on me.

My vocation is I do what I do. I’m an actor; that’s what I do.

I have a relationship with the southern hemisphere that’s a really good one. I love it there.

When I first read ‘Boyz,’ I cried. It could have been about some kids in Warsaw, Poland. I knew it was good, but I had no idea what it would do to me.