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Terence Howard, the star of Sundance's $9 million buzz flick Hustle & Flow, gave a whole career's worth of good copy in a NY Times Magazine story back in early 2001. He's so quotable that we're almost willing to forget that since this piece originally ran, he was in Glitter, Angel Eyes, and Biker Boyz.

· "If I was white, I would be huge."

· "I'm going to Prague in four days to do this movie [Hart's War]with Bruce Willis and this other guy named Colin Ferrell [sic]. He's new. He's made only a couple of movies, and he's getting $2 million for this film. I'm still fighting to get half a million dollars after making a dozen movies. So I want to see what this kid's about. I'm like: Let's get in the ring and box. We'll see who wins."

· "But right before I got 'The Best Man,' I was ready to quit the business. I was minutes away from suicide. My wife had left me. And she had good reason — I was bad when it came to women. It's like Superman. He had all those superpowers, but he didn't do all good things with them."

· "After the [The Best Man] came out, studio executives started calling and saying, 'You're going to be the next Denzel,"' Howard recalls. "I said, 'I don't want to be Denzel.'

· "...My dad and my uncles were pimps, and I learned the gift of gab from them. They taught me to open women up, but I leave scars."