Paterson Joseph Quotes

Paterson Joseph

Profession : Actor

Birth : June 22, 1964

I stayed in some lovely hotels in Thailand, especially the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok. It was very peaceful and really well done. It also had food to die for and the staff were incredibly polite.

Paterson Joseph

Drama must give us a view not just of what was, but of what could be.

Paterson Joseph

I don't know any black actors who are as short as I am.

Paterson Joseph

Shakespeare taught me everything I know about love. Its vibrancy. How afterwards your life seems darker. And everything I know about power, too - about the selfishness of ambition.

Paterson Joseph

In a life where you are oppressed and not listened to, and told to sit in the corner and shut up, which is the life I've led, to feel the appreciation of an audience can mean a huge amount.

Paterson Joseph

There's a desire now to have multi-ethnic casts in many, many things, even in costume drama, which I'm very, very pleased about.

Paterson Joseph

I deplore people who can't keep their word.

Paterson Joseph

We have fixed ideas of Tudor Britain, Victorian and Edwardian Britain as entirely white. But an awful lot of what we know as history was curated by racists. There is no other word for it.

Paterson Joseph

You can transform somebody just by telling them, 'I'm listening.'

Paterson Joseph

I hope my play, 'Sancho,' will contribute a little to an understanding of our shared British history, whoever we are.

Paterson Joseph

Black women's hair is a complicated and skillful thing that you need to know in order to tackle it and make it look great.

Paterson Joseph

The marvellous thing about Proust - although it must have been a nightmare living in his head - is he forgot nothing. His obsession with detail is extraordinary, the way the sun plays on a room, the smell of the air. He's like Van Gogh, seeing things in a way that no one else has seen them before.

Paterson Joseph

Each case - each story - is interesting in itself. I think that's what 'Law & Order: U.K.' maintains and that's why it can go on with whoever's doing it, because the story is key - not the soap opera, the lives of the policeman or the barristers. It's about the actual story of the crime itself - how did it happen and who was guilty.

Paterson Joseph

When I got to secondary school I copped out and started bunking off.

Paterson Joseph

When I took on the role of Kamal Hadley it was a question of - how do I depict a racist who is black, in a country where he is in the minority, but also where they are ruling?

Paterson Joseph

I love the Olivier. It's a great space for me because I'm a big actor.

Paterson Joseph

That the whole world is not the West and that there are other ways of doing things, whether it's eating, seeing or valuing life.

Paterson Joseph

Racism is a strange mental illness where you look at somebody and say, 'I hate you because of the colour of your skin.'

Paterson Joseph

The black presence in our British history has sometimes wilfully, sometimes neglectfully, been whitewashed out of our national tale.

Paterson Joseph

As I know from my own experience, I may have the skill and the training to wield, say, a Bronte hero's finely turned phrases, but it'll be a cold day in hell when I'm even in the room for the Mr. Darcy auditions.

Paterson Joseph