Denzel Washington Quotes

We read a lot from the Satanic bible. It's not quite the opposite of the normal bible - a lot of its principles are just about being yourself, if you want to do something you do it, if you wanna have affairs you can. But we never hold daily rituals or anything.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

I want it to resonate: there's no rule for how to live your life. You can do things your own way.

No one controlled Frank Sinatra or told him how to sing. No secret group of managers has been telling someone like Jay-Z what to do or how to look. And no one tells me what to do except me and the people who believe in me.

You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.

We do things the way we do them and we do them unashamedly. It's our art. If you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to.

Even growing up, if I dealt with any pressure to be a certain way, I knew that as an artistic lane, dancing was the one that was a little more freed up - like no one in my family is really doing that, I can be that person.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

My life is not a political campaign. I just write about what is on my mind. I just play whatever I feel like playing. Whatever is in my soul at the time is what I want to do. I have, thank god, enough people who are still interested in what I am doing so that I can go out and keep doing it.

Those who fear that we are losing our individualism couldn't be more wrong: Americans have never been more free to create and recreate themselves.

I don't ever worry about whether I'm being true to my country roots. My country roots were adopted. I never worry about what I can do and what I should do. I just do what I want to do.

I'm my own artist, and I see artists as movies. No one should try to change them for anything. If you don't like it, you just don't follow it. And if you don't like a movie you don't watch it. Watch another movie.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

I'm not a politician, I'm not an ideologue, I'm not an organizer anymore. I'm a human being sharing ideas, and those ideas have to feel fresh and from my heart and my head, and I have to feel it. You can't force that feeling.

At the end of the day I have to please myself. And I've made a record to please myself.

To a certain extent, this tour is a celebration of individuality and that you can invent and reinvent yourself. You should have the power to be able to do that. Sexuality is a part of that. It should release you. It doesn't have to be an issue. It shouldn't box you in.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

You don't have to burn books, you don't have to rebel against teachers to rebel; to rebel is to truly own your own self.

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

Hey, if something is making you feel good, and it's not hurting anyone else, does it really matter if others believe?

All artists are now free to express their own personality.

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.