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The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.'

The biggest compliment I get is that I don't sound like anybody else. I think I value that as the highest compliment.

I would say things like 'I am the greatest! I'm pretty! If you talk jive, you'll drop in five! I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! I'm pretty!' When white people heard me talking like this, some said, 'That black man talks too much. He's bragging.'

As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.

I want young people to look at me and go, 'Damn, I want to be like that brother. He sharp, he be on point. He represent black people.' I want to make the life of the mind sexy.

The biggest compliment I can ever get as an actor is to have someone say, 'We didn't recognize you.'

I've always taken pride to be the white guy that can talk to the black people, that can refer to them truly as a brother from a different mother.

The greatest compliment I ever got was when people called me an artist, and I understand that solo aspect of being an artist, when you're in there by yourself, trying to do something great, and people who don't even know you can come up and just dump on you.

Nobody told David Clarke what to think, what to feel, what to say, what to believe in, who to marry, what kind of food to eat - you know that thing that the race hustlers like to say defines your blackness? But yet every time I look in the mirror in the morning, I see a black guy looking back at me.