A biography for Laurence Fishburnehasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“We are three dimensional beings: body, mind, spirit.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It's nice to get the feedback from a theater audience. It's a gas.”
“Some characters need to be more performance-orientated; some, you have to be still.”
“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.”
“If you like rock and roll, if you like rhythm and blues, if you like jazz, if you like hip-hop, you might be black-ish.”
“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 try to meditate.”
“There's great theatre in New York City, but no New York City in theatre.”
“I play characters. I don't think I really have a persona per se. I don't play the same guy every time. I show up, you don't know what I'm gonna do. I like it that way. I've intentionally tried to do it that way. I think that's what's interesting.”
“We don't really see a lot of war movies about the people that are left behind, dealing with the deaths of those who serve and the sacrifices they make.”
“Doing theater makes you feel like a real actor.”
“I've played a lot of bad guys, 'cause that was the only work I could get. People saw my face and went 'oooh'.”
“Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.”
“All I know is, I'm trying to do things that are a little different whenever I can.”
“There's a bunch of plays that I never got to do because I was either too young or too old for the parts, like 'Slow Dance on the Killing Ground' and 'Dutchman.' For 'American Buffalo,' I was the wrong color.”
“I don't want to be 45 years old and have been a hot actor when I was 33 and have people going, 'Whatever happened to Fishburne?'”
“Jesse Eisenberg, this little nebbishy guy, as Lex Luthor? For me, that's a genius move.”