James Avery quotes:

Monetary success is not success. Career success is not success. Life, someone that loves you, giving to others, doing something that makes you feel complete and full. That is success. And it isn't dependent on anyone else.

I don't understand this whole Twitter, Facebook stuff. I don't get it. Make a phone call. Talk to somebody.

I did 'Othello' at the Oregon Shakes - I was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for two and a half years. That's where my training is.

There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.

Doing Shakespeare certainly makes you a better actor.

I wanted to leave home, and I didn't know where I was going or what I was going to do or what would happen. That's youth, though. Being fixated on things. I was fixated on being a writer.

There are too many African-Americans with too much money for us to have to go to anybody else for anything in terms of schools, in terms of scholarships, in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of moving us along as a group to that place where we should be as a people.

See, the thing that bothers me with young actors, young actors of color specifically, is that they see movies and television, and they figure that's all it is to it. They have no respect for the craft. They want to be, you know, movie stars or whatever. And I worry that we're losing a certain quality, you know?

On one show before a live audience, I had to look out the door and call for Will Smith to come in. The audience couldn't see him, but there he was with his naked butt staring me in the face. I didn't normally hang out with twenty-something practical jokers, so sometimes he was a little much.

I have wandered many roads that I have never traveled; touched many things that my eyes have never seen. It is through stories that life is made, and through stories that life is saved.

Writing is such a singular and lonely occupation. And it's interesting; all of the work that you create is so singular.