Money doesn't buy happiness. Some people say it's a heck of a down payment, though.

Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.

I've just directed a film called The Great Debaters, which is inspired by a true story about a young college debating team in the thirties and two of those people are still alive and we put them on tape on the film and I'm sure that will be added to the DVD, and to get the opportunity to do that is very cool.

Put God first in everything you do.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.

I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.