A Quote by Tony Todd
I grew up a poor kid to a single mom, so as an African-American actor I have a responsibility to hold the mirror up and reflect our stories. I'm living the dream and also escaped the inevitable.
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I just grew up a poor black kid in Alabama with a single mom and two brothers.
Being broke and poor - I mean, you grow up in the environment I grew up in, grew up hard and grew up poor. Your mom doesn't have a car until you make it to the NBA... no telephone. So, I mean, if you grow up like that, and you're able to make it to this level and be blessed the way I've been blessed, it's always great to give back.
My family moved to the Philippines when I was 14. While living there, I learned that my mom grew up very poor. Seeing that kind of abject poverty firsthand during my travels deeply shaped my life. Seeing those living conditions motivated me to want to tell inspiring stories of struggle and triumph.
This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.
As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic.
I'm an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.
Yet again, an ancient answer echoes across the centuries: Listen! Listen to stories! For what stories do, above all else, is hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves. Stories are mirrors of human be-ing, reflecting back our very essence. In a story, we come to know precisely the both/and, mixed-upped-ness of our very being. In the mirror of another's story, we can discover our tragedy and our comedy-and therefore our very human-ness, the ambiguity and incongruity, that lie at the core of the human condition.
The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
You know that I am living proof that the American Dream is real. Growing up, our congressman cut through government bureaucratic red tape to help my mom buy our first house. That's the kind of congressman I'll be.
As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven't been told.
My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.
My mom had beautiful clothes. My mom is elegant; my mom is glamorous. But my mom is also really real, and I grew up with a mother who had babies crawling on her head and spitting up on her when she was wearing gorgeous, expensive things, and it was never an issue.
My wife Jennifer's family is all from there. Jennifer grew up there, so we have personal ties forever - her mom, dad, her brother, her twin brother - so, there's certainly a personal connection there that will also be there. Also, even though I grew up in Omaha, I feel like I really grew up in Milwaukee.
I grew up knowing about [Ted] Bundy because I grew up in Aspen and that is one of the places he kept escaping from. I remember one of the times he had escaped the Pitkin County Jail, my stepfather sat outside with a shotgun because everyone knew Bundy had escaped and so everybody was on alert.
I'm a kid who grew up in an all African-American neighborhood and got into schools and aspired to just be me, and didn't worry about labels or anything. Just wanted to be a success at what I did.
I mean, I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich. I think some people who have never met me have a misconception that when I was living with my father when he was successful, that I was somehow adversely affected by his success or the money he had and was making at the time.
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