“Anything that's outside the standard of the average black male is look...” — Ashton Sanders Quote

“Anything that's outside the standard of the average black male is looked down upon. For me, I wasn't raised playing sports. I was artistic, so that was looked down upon by people in my church, and I was teased for that growing up in school, so it goes both ways.”

“A lot of these artists are out here don't stay true to why they started doing this in the first place.”

“I was skinny and black and didn't play sports. And I was bullied.”

“I had high hopes for 'Moonlight,' just off the reaction I had while reading the script.”

“It's really crazy looking back on my bullies or whoever was trying to torment me or tease me, because karma is just, like, crazy.”

“I'm acting! And doing it for income! But it's for something that I love, and that's super rare.”

“I loved my parents. There were never any rows. It was a sort of artistic, bohemian upbringing.”

“Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.”

“Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn't mean only artistic creativity, although that's part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.”

“I'm a very practical actor, and having an artistic triumph that's a commercial flop doesn't do you any good, in any phase of show world.”

“I don't think being a star has ever been part of the plan. But I always want to do really good work, even when I made career moves with projects that made more sense in sort of a career way than in an artistic way... like I did with 'The Darkest Hour.'”

“I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.”