HILL HARPER

I champion the idea of being more conscious. I call it being an active architect of your own life. Building your life like an architect builds a structure.

Intimacy can be about holding someone's hand. It could be about stroking their hair.

If you can't get excited about living life, then what are you doing?

Screening for colon cancer can stop cancer in its tracks.

I'm not telling anyone, 'Quit your job and be homeless to go for your dream.'

There's nothing wrong with wanting a partner and doing the things to have one. To protect ourselves, we have to say, 'I don't need one.'

People are afraid of an unorganized, wasteful government.

Most people aren't honest with themselves about money.

We all have different timetables in reaching and realizing that being in healthy partnership is better than being on our own.

I love being athletic and doing things that are active, even when I'm traveling.

Certainly, those of us in the entertainment industry, we are part of creating fear in people - 'fear' for me stands for 'false evidence appearing real.' We create fantasy, and in certain ways that's wonderful because it allows people to escape. But it can suck people into wanting to achieve something that isn't real.

We all have inherited so many types of fears, whether they're race-based, culture-based, gender-based, age-based, family-based. And then we get comfortable with these fears.

On 'CSI: NY,' the audience knew I was a really good guy, and I caught the bad guy.

Whatever your calling is as a service, follow it - that's beautiful.

In acting class, teachers talk about how the 'givens' of a situation help define a character.

I've been trying to make a difference as an actor. I want to play characters that move people, have them look at their lives differently, or give them an escape.

My friend is a former race car driver, so he races for Mercedes, and I root for him. I have a car that I love to race, I'll take it to the track.

Here's the deal: I believe - and I attempt to live my life this way - we all have more time than we think we do. We all waste so much time.

Many of us are in are in our own prisons that aren't made of iron bars.

Roles make the actor.

On the male side of my family, cancer has been very insidious, and so I'm just attempting to live a lifestyle that doesn't follow in their footsteps.

I've gotten a firsthand view at the destruction that black men and black women not being able to stay and build healthy relationships has had on the black family and black children.

You're in a situation where you have limited education opportunities, you don't have any money, you can't get a job; what are you going to do? You're going to go back to this criminal network that you actually made while you were in prison.

What's interesting is with a lot of the work I do through my foundation, the 'Manifest Your Destiny' foundation, we really encourage people, and we attempt to empower, uplift and inspire people to live out their dreams, live out their destiny.

Whenever there's an opportunity to celebrate the written word and celebrate the folks that read the written word, and, I think, to encourage other writers to write and encourage folks to read more and get connected to it in a personal way, it's a positive thing.