I want to do something that people can really say, 'Hey, man, that was good, I'm proud of you, I'm proud of that.' 'Pride' and 'Transformers' and things like that.

When you're offstage, that's the footprint. That's the man God's gonna judge.

You're never going to see me playing a buffoon.

Every time you see a black romance it's over-the-top. There always has to be extreme hostility between the sexes. He has to cheat. She has to show him how independently strong she is, not just as a woman but as a black woman.

Making people laugh is what I've been doing since I was like four or five years old. I still have a lust, I still have a passion. I don't care about how I look, I'm dedicated to the laughs.

You have to meet all of the challenges, big and small. Because how you start is how you finish.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.