actors-from-the-united-states

"That’s what I want to build. You ain’t gotta understand this. You have to surround yourself with good people and hardworking people that have the same vision as you"

"People being real. It's got to be real to make me laugh. Either it's real, or someone's told me a bold-face lie. I think it's funny because if they think I believe that, they must be crazy"

"Now, I’m leaving standup because there’s a lot of stuff in Hollywood that I got going on that I got to do. And, God got a lot in me, and creating these ideas that I put together, which is the ideas that you love"

"It was a collaborative approach on the creative where they gave me the freedom to interject personalities from my world into the content, which helped to organically connect the two spaces. It was entertaining to play various school characters while highlighting SNIPES in a fresh way. I look forward to continued work with SNIPES as they’ve shown they are authentic and true to the culture"

"A woman's prayer, how powerful it is in a man's life. If you get a woman on your side to pray for you, things can change in a different way"

"The same school I was getting kicked out of is is the same school I’m shooting the commercial at n"

"Expect the unexpected. It's like talking to your family members, and making everybody laugh"

"Everybody was mad because I had to leave social media, but I had to leave social media to become the person I am in standup today"

"So many people are starting to find out that they can do it themselves, which is why I pride myself on what we have done"

"I never thought my way of thinking would equate to comedy"

"Now, a lot of people like, ‘Wayne, you leaving millions of dollars on the table,’ but the reason being, I tell everybody when God tells you to move, you got to move sometimes"

"Just know they're coming to see the real. We'll be there all the way live, and I've come to make them laugh"

"We don’t need to have anybody else, but we definitely tried, and it was a lot of ‘no’s.’ So I think that was the reason why we went and banked on ourselves [and] put all our money into it. So it’s just me and my own personal production company 4Lifers"

"I graduated twelve years ago, barely…That’s what made my personality today — that school"

"For the majority of my company, For Life Entertainment, we try to make sure that we have a say in any of the stuff that we’re putting out, or any of the commercial stuff"

"A smart thing you can do is try to build your own IP and try to build your own business around you"

"We speak of real life and with real drama that's going on, and situations people know of and have heard of. If you watch a Kountry Wayne sketch, you're going to get a lot of situations"

"Sometimes you got to lose to win. Everything I got going right now, I put it on the backburner for standup for years. If y’all can remember, back in the day, when I went and did standup, I had to stop doing social media content"

"Just living, but living outside of the box and doing different things. Everything’s in play. You just have to watch what you say, because the landscape we’re living in is challenging. But I try to be wide open"

"I hope others will follow that same process and know that if you are getting money from these companies, don’t just think that you have to go buy a car or go buy a big house"

"We’re very picky about who we work with"

"I put some stuff together, and man, the next thing you know, boom. Wow. The response changed my whole outlook on everything. I couldn’t sleep that night"

"I mainly do it for the fans, knowing that I can do it myself. And now that I have money from brand deals and people that I work with to do it, it’s like I don’t need another company to come in"

"I was there watching these guys, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m ready to try"

"I was like, ‘If it was where I’m from, you had to go to the side of someone’s house, to the refrigerator.’ That was one of my first jokes"

"I talked about the commercial: The white parents would let all these kids come in and just open the refrigerator and just be in there and get something to drink, and they pull out some Sunny Delight"

"I never stop. You’ve got to keep creating"

"We tried too early on to push our stuff out there to the bigger people — like the ones you mentioned [Netflix and Amazon]. It quickly turned into a ‘no,’ but I think with the success of the shows and us doing it on our own kind of proved to me that we can do this by ourselves"

"I think the key thing is to not only be outraged, and have your emotions on a high level, you also have to really get involved with what can be done to change things"

"Throughout the roller-coaster of a year that we have all lived through, television has helped us stay connected as a society like never before. It not only entertained us, but as it always has, it helped to open our eyes, educate us, and hopefully brought about a better understanding of who we are as a people"

"St. Louis is a very polarizing city. It's been pretty segregated most my life. But we’ve been a city that has gotten along. It's kind of hard to see these injustices on any level where it feels like the people are now separated again along racial lines"

"Get in relationships with people who can actually cause some change,"

"I do think it's important that as a community, as a city that we understand that this is about getting some answers and getting some healing, so we're not dealing with these issues every week"

"Since I was a little boy huddled up next to my grandmother, television has always been my reliable friend, so it is an enormous honor for me to host this year's Emmy Awards"

"I have less opportunities than I used to, but I don't think there's any prejudice against me because of my age"

"Colorblind casting shouldn't violate common sense"

"Art has a deep responsibility, social, cultural, and otherwise. And that the basic motivation for the creation of art is, in a sense, to meet those responsibilities. Now, it doesn't mean that you cannot express yourself in any way you want to, but it takes place in a social context, whether you mean it to do so or not"

"Criticism used to be an art practiced by educated people. Now you don't know what any of them are looking for in anything"

"I fully expected that a black man particularly would by lynched from time to time because it was going on when I came into the world"

"Optimism is small and personal"

"We have freedom. What we don't have is equality!"

"They knew what to say because it fell into the existing rhetoric"

"One of the traps we've tried to avoid is the presentation of ourselves as victims or beggars"

"We're going somewhere, even if it's only around the Goddamn corner"

"The struggle and the arts are connected almost by definition"

"I had a sense of certainty that no matter how dark it is now, one of these days it'll change."

"Performing artists are less political today than they were years ago because they're not called on to be political"

"Peace, peace, peace. This is where it’s at, and this is where I am."

"I come together to say, I choose to live for brotherhood and not for folly. I choose peace and not war. I choose life and not death."

"I would say that a deeper patriotism is required when we consider to whom we owe our patriotic response"