I met [ Samuel L. Jackson ] for the first time on The Today Show. He came out of an elevator. I was promoting A Mighty Wind and he was promoting something else. He said, "I hear we're going to be working together." I said, "On what?" He said, 'The Man.' I hadn't heard his name mentioned before. I made a few calls and found out he had the script and was interested. That was it.

I said to George Lucas, "I'd like a purple lightsaber." And he said, "Why?" and I said, "I just want to be able to find myself. I'm the most powerful Jedi in the universe, and I think it would be an interesting thing for me to have a different color lightsaber than anybody else."

I love to play real people... good people that I know the audience will get behind. It's the good people in the world that I gravitate to.

You ain't got but one life. You ought to live it the way you want.

I sit at home and read books. I watch movies. I watch television. I go and play golf. I don't go to nightclubs. I don't go out to dinner that often. I'm not a big party guy.

I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.

Everything that I've gone through informs me and my opinions in a way, I guess because I am a child of segregation. I lived through it. I lived in it. I was of it.