Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Columbus Short

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.

I think showing heroes as fallible helps us and reminds us that we are ourselves fallible and no man is perfect but we can still achieve great things.

There comes a time when you have to exercise patience.

Little Walter and Muddy Waters were incredible. And Bo Diddley was doing some great stuff, too.

There are as many quality African-American actors and actresses as Caucasians, but it seems that they get a lot more opportunities.

Creating content, creating art, material, being a job creator - it's all very, very important. Very important.

I want to provide jobs for people.

There's a myriad of things that go into why movies don't happen right when you make them. If you make a movie in 2010, sometimes it takes up to a year for post-production, and that puts you into 2011, then you have to figure out what your product is, and that takes some time.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

I can say with full sincerity that I am happy. I'm happy because I'm doing what I love and I'm not selling out.

Be a creator, not just sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone to call you into the game or call our number.

I never want to have to take certain roles, because I want to maintain a certain level of artistic credibility. But sometimes you're forced to do things for the money.

I haven't been perfect.

Have I ever abused a woman? Never.

The thing about addiction is you think you're getting off on people, and you're not, and the only person you're fooling is yourself.

I've never put my hands on a woman, physically, ever.

I'm afraid of what happens if this career doesn't pan out, because I have so much invested in it that I can't turn back now.

Sometimes you get yourselves in situations where you don't realize people are actually testing you. People are actually provoking you.

I've always been apprehensive about doing comic books, period.

I love working to push the industry forward.

You've got to be honest with yourself aesthetically about who could you play. You want to artistically be true to that character.

When you do an action movie, you've got to come prepared to do an action movie.

I just can't relax. That's my problem.

It's like, if you're on a ship, and you're sailing towards your destination, but the ship sinks: that doesn't mean that you have to sink. Just because the ship sinks doesn't mean you have to sink. You just figure it out until a raft comes along, and God will send you a raft. Or He'll send you another boat to get you to your destination.

If I want to be truthfully honest, I think, dealing with the stress of the situations that I've been going through, medicating with anything, I think, is dangerous because it becomes a crutch.

Everybody who knows me is like, 'Dude, you've got to chill out.' I can't not work, given where I want to be.

I think there's a time when your personal life gets magnified by who we are as celebrities.

I don't want to do action that doesn't mean anything. Everything I do I want to have character development and three-dimensional characters, fallible humans, and this is definitely one of them.

[Show] business is tough. You never know who or what's real. It's tough when you get in this business, if you have no grounded foundation other than Hollywood, because this business isn't real. We're getting paid to do what we love, but it isn't real.

I can say with full sincerity that I am happy. I'm happy because I'm doing what I love and I'm not selling out. And I can sleep at night because I'm at peace with it.

As we speak, that is what we are doing. Projects that come to you are not written for you. We have to take a lesson from Will Smith, who develops projects he can shine in. We're trying to develop things from the ground up.

I've learned that I can't do it all at once. So, you have to figure out your angle of attack. Coming in on the acting front, acting is a passion of mine. It's a true love. Dancing, I kind of just fell into. Choreographing, the same thing. But making films, producing and directing, that's the heartbeat of my existence.

I don't know if it was a defining moment. I knew it as soon as I could comprehend the possibility of having a career. I knew very young I wanted to be a movie star. As much as I grew into love of the craft. As soon as I could speak I was auditioning and going to classes every day. It was my life.

You stay with the foundation and then you just try different things because you don't know how the director will cut it and you want to give him, what will work, and you want to give him some options, give yourself some options, discover some things when you start to play. That's what we do; we get paid to play.

What dancing has helped me with is blocking; it makes me comfortable with my body. You know how to hit your mark, you know how to embody a swagger. But sitting down and looking across the table at another actor and being able to go to battle on screen is nothing to do with singing or dancing.

First of all, God inspires me, where he's brought me, it blows my mind. To know that He brought me this far, it could not have been an accident, to go forward, I'm excited to leap into the void, I'm excited about tomorrow, the unknown, excited to see what else He has for me.

I try to carve my own way so the actors who come after me will say, "I want to do it like Columbus did it."

I want to play Martin Luther King. I want to tell the real story, his demons, his struggles as a man, not just as a hero but fallible, I want to show that side.

Every movie I work with the costume designer to see what feels like the character, not what Columbus would wear but what is right for the character. Outside of the armored truck standard issue security guard uniform, this guy is trying to make ends meet. He might have one pair of jeans, the same boot, maybe changes his shirt but he doesn't have a walk-in closet full of things, so I wanted something comfortable that felt like the character.

I was struggling with drugs, I had a lot on my plate, and you know, I was using unhealthy ways to kind of self-medicate and deal with a lot of heavy duty stuff in my life.

The point of acting is to hide yourself and get lost in character. To play the same character in eighteen movies would be defeating the purpose I believe so I try to keep a little bit of diversity.

I'm a silly guy, I love wit and cynicism and sarcasm.

I take bits and pieces from every director. I'd say Sylvain [White] and Nimrod [Antal]. They were more about teaching me lens sizes and depth of field and how to move the camera and lighting. I do want to direct and I didn't go to film school, so having a director that are very much hands on that way and looking to let me learn, that is a key factor.