I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I know I had my equivalents in Adrian Lester and Lenny James when I was at drama school. I remember David Harewood doing 'Othello' at the National and Adrian Lester having done Cheek by Jowl's famous 'As You Like It and Company' at the Donmar. Not necessarily performances I saw but just the fact they happened was massively encouraging.

Every adversity every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me because I like to have something to prove.

My dad was a Marine. He was one of the Montford Point Marines. Those are the equivalent of the Tuskegee Airmen for Marines. He's a tough tough guy. When I was 15 we had a fight and I didn't speak to him for 10 years.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.