Djimon Hounsou Quotes & Sayings

“I hope more people will ask diamond companies to continue changing the way they do business in Africa.”

“Rehearsals are set up so that you find out all the nuances about your character. You never want to beat yourself up. It's about finding the right direction, and most of the time, the right direction is not what you think is the right direction. That's why the director's there: to guide you there.”

“Until you are somewhat comfortable and confident and embrace who you are as a person, you can't possibly love somebody else because you don't like yourself that much.”

“Funny enough, every role that I have had, I try to tone down my accent or speak with better diction.”

“If anything, Calvin Klein is the iconic company in terms of fashion. They do have iconic images for their campaigns.”

“The gym can serve as an excellent place where kids and young men and women can really empty their issues right on the floor.”

“America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.”

“I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.”

“I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.”

“School bored me. Being educated and being intelligent are two different things. I thought I was smart enough. And I wanted to be an entertainer. I stopped going to school as a way of saying I was mature, a way of saying I was going to choose who I was going to become.”