Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Lenny Henry - Page 2

It was never on the cards for me to go to uni, going to a sink secondary modern in the Midlands. The threat was that if you didn't get your exams, you would end up in a factory. Which I did, but actually that was a great experience, and I would have even got an engineering diploma if I had stuck my three years out.

As a performer, you get your 'thing.' You're the deadpan comedian, or the mad one, or the sexy one, and then you rely on that and mine that seam for years and years and you kind of forget who you were. There's this mask that you hold up between you and the audience that means they never get to see who you really are.

I do like a well-written sketch with a bunch of jokes in it, and I like stand-up with good jokes in it it.

It's about challenging yourself; wanting to do things that push you.

With standup, I was thrown into the deep end at a very early age, without being able to swim. Acting was the same.

I never let myself forget that I'm really lucky in my work to be able to discover so many people and places, and to have the opportunity to bring some of their stories to new audiences.

I want diversity to be at the very heart of the BBC and not delivered by some other party with increased government interference, bureaucracy and unforeseen consequences.

My mum came to Britain from Clarendon, in the south of Jamaica, to make a better life for her family.

It's nice to get home and do normal stuff. Put the rubbish out, do the school run - it means you stay grounded. I knew a horn player who was so used to being on the road that he became institutionalised; he could never adjust to being at home. I'm really glad I didn't let it get that far.

BAME kids get discouraged - too many glass ceilings to break through.

Wouldn't it be great, if there was a one-stop shop where funny people could take their ideas and have them made?

Comedy is a way of hiding - especially character comedy.

I got into lots of fights at school: I'd get racially abused, then lash out. One day, this kid said something and instead of putting my fists up, I said something back: people laughed, and he walked away.

My mum was a fixed point in my universe who was never going to grow old or die; she was always going to be there. And when she got sick, I was on the road all the time, I wasn't at home much, there was a lot of pressure. It was an awful time, and when she died, it was like your world falls apart.

I listen to a lot of Sade.

My story is an immigrant story. My story is of people moving from one country thousands of miles away to another and forming new links, new family and new relationships.

I lament the passing of 'Play for Today,' 'Armchair Theatre,' 'Screen One and Two' and 'Comedy Playhouse' - because these shows gave a platform to new talent and new writing on primetime television.

Black people didn't start coming to see me until 1982. I'd just started doing Delbert, and suddenly my world changed. I started doing black-centred characters that were about people I knew in the community.

When I was younger, I was very thick-skinned - my skin is actually getting thinner as I get older.

Mum would hit us with anything. You'd see her looking for something to hit you with, and you'd think, please let it be something reasonably soft. She threw a chair at me once. It was like being in a western.

It's not just about showbusiness - everywhere you go people are discriminated against. And if by having an organised voice against inequality and a lack of diversity we might be able to push that down - how brilliant would it be?

If you can't see, you can't be. If we don't see BAME people on the TV, or in film, we become invisible.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor has opened my eyes in many ways.

I believe that if we want to change our industry we must look beyond what we see on our TV screens and fix the bigger problems lying beneath. When it comes to racial diversity that means looking at who commissions and makes the programmes.

My mum was very, very tough.

I never asked to be compared to Richard Pryor. I just realised he was one of the greatest humorists we'd ever had on earth, I knew I wanted to be like that.

Stand-up's a lottery - you think it's funny but the audience can disagree.

I love the BBC but I just want this thing of BAME inclusion in the demographic of the people who make the decisions about what we do and how we do it, to change.

It is wrong if nearly every time we hear a black or Asian actor portraying their lives they are actually speaking the words of someone who has never experienced their reality. And to effectively silence disabled people from telling their own truth on film or TV is close to criminal and will not help wider society understand their reality.

I read 'Fences' when I was about 30 and I thought: This is too sad.' But you get older and you start to go, 'Yeah, yeah, this is like life, why wouldn't I want to do it?'

Nothing surprises me as far as racism is concerned in this country.

It is wrong if how we see women on TV is largely determined by male directors.

I worked at the BBC for 35 years before I had a meeting with anyone who looks like me. The only people like me were cleaning the corridors, and that is not right.

I got accused of misrepresenting all people of colour in Great Britain. I would get told off a lot. 'How can you do African characters when you're not African?' But I gave it a go. Maybe if there had been more of us I could have just been Lenny Henry from the Black Country with Jamaican parents.

Quotas are often about quantity and not quality. I think people should get jobs because they are qualified and they can prove they are good at the job.

In the 1970s in black and Asian households up and down the country, there's a familiar story that when we saw a non-white person on TV we would call the rest of the family to the sitting room to have a look. The story that is less well known is what it was like to be that one black person on TV.

I was always uncool. I was always from variety - big bow ties, flared trousers. Never cool.

My dad never hugged me, never said he was proud of me.

I have a CBE - which I accepted because I knew how much my mum, who made it all possible, would have loved it.

What a gift it would be if every child in the country could hear a professional orchestra at least once.

That's where depression hits you most - your home life. It doesn't affect your work. I can't do this zany, wacky, funny thing any more. I haven't been like that for a long time.

Ecstasy is a drug so powerful, it makes white people think they can dance.

They don't make red noses to fit black people. I have a wide nose like a Volkswagen and I have never had a red nose that fitted me.

I've been to Africa many times in the past 20 years, but I can't believe this is the first time since the very first Red Nose Day, that I've been back to Ethiopia. The last time I was here was just after the famine and it was crazy, there were people all over the place, kids without families, aid workers, camera crews.

My voice was pretty good almost all through Othello. Alexander Technique really helped my posture and focus.

It was really bizarre. I was learning how to be a black guy from a white guy pretending to be a black man.

The filming of Shakespeare is always problematic, because he hates posing for the camera