A biography for Laurence Fishburnehasn’t been written yet.
“A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me.”
“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.”
“As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.”
“I have this unshakeable faith. I believe in myself; I believe in God.”
“Mine were informal mentors. They were all in my working life.”
“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.”
“I had two times in my life where I wanted to give up everything I worked for, but God gave me a job.”
“'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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We are our children's first teachers.”
“Do mainstream crowds want to watch a movie about good things happening in black neighborhoods? Do black audiences want to see a little girl doing something in a white world?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm not dyeing my hair and trying to pretend I'm 40. That's not going to work for me.”
“It's very difficult to set a film in one setting without giving the audience some intensity and some relief.”
“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 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.”
“Having 50 to 60 years on the planet should give you a sense of how to master the way you look and live your life.”
“I see that I have, as part of my stock in trade, a very regal personality and carriage. I see that I have a kind of strength, a kind of command, and a kind of power that one would associated with a monarch.”