Top 35 Ving Rhames Quotes

I live a very simple life.

I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a quote-unquote star or anything. My thing was just feeling blessed to be able to make my living acting.

I graduated college in 1983, so that’s 32 years, and all I’ve done for a living is act or commercials or voiceovers. So I have nothing to complain about.

I do fish, and as a matter of fact, I used to do a lot of deep sea fishing, but as far as going into the water, I don’t go out deep into the water.

Snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, I saw something – I don’t know what it was to this day. My mind couldn’t relate to what it was… If I saw it and knew it was a shark, I wouldn’t be as afraid, but I saw something that looked prehistoric, and I haven’t been snorkeling since.

God is putting me in a position to affect people.

You can feel I am whatever you want to feel I am. God knows who I am, and I know who I am.

I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.

I like to say that I didn’t choose acting – acting chose me.

Most American actors are taught the Stanislavsky method… Method acting, but I really think that as an actor you have to develop what works for you. There is really not one way of doing anything. There are many ways of achieving the same goal.

I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.

I’ve always been taught to just play the truth of the situation. If comedy comes out of that, or drama, whatever comes out of it, at least I’m playing the truth of the moment-to-moment reality.

Really, if you get in the ring and box with someone for real, I don’t think it is a sport. As far as professional fighters, you are literally putting your life on the line.

In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.

‘Mission: Impossible’ is fun. But for myself as an artist, I’m really more concerned with the human condition, the human experience, especially from an African American point of view.

I don’t need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

Since God is the foundation of my life, anything that streams from that can only be positive.

I saw that crime pays, but I never got involved in crime.

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father’s folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn’t do this and offer me this background, I wouldn’t be here.

Rosewood is what Americans did to Americans. We have to hold the mirror up… and look at ourselves. Sometimes that’s an ugly sight. And sometimes you have to go through that pain – both black America and white America – so we can finally find some racial harmony.

It’s really how you deal with people. Do people respect you? Are you honest with people even if it’s something they don’t want to hear? Anyone in Hollywood will tell you I’m extremely up front and honest almost to a fault.

I’ve known Laurence Fishburne for about twenty years.

We’re all about trying to teach the kids life through basketball.

Miss Goodblatt would call on me to read. She said I had a talent. So on a whim, I auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan.

You don’t have to make, you know, $3 Million dollars a movie, or $20 Million dollars a movie, but if you make a living doing what you love doing, then that’s success to me.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

I graduated on a Friday. By Monday, I was doing Shakespeare in the Park.

My approach to the work is the same, whether I had the lead or a supporting role. I consider myself a character actor in the true sense of the word. Unless I’m doing my autobiography, I’m playing a character.

‘Mission: Impossible’ is basically entertainment, and for what it is, it’s fine. I don’t think most actors become actors to do that type of film.

I was more interested in playing sports than acting. I didn’t take acting too seriously until the end of my junior year.

My wife is a former homicide detective, LAPD. The wonderful thing that I was able to capture is my wife’s experiences from human and professional, and how do you deal with some of the atrocities that happen in L.A. and not bring them home.

I’m the spokesman for ADT, and ADT, brother, pays better than most actors make on film.

Since I graduated college, all I have ever done for a living was acting.

Rottweilers are victims of a stereotype. They’re not that bad.

The more you do a stunt, the more you increase the risk of something happening.