Top 75 Lupita Nyongo Quotes

I’m pretty awesome at making salad dressings.

I love filmmaking, but I decided to go to drama school because I thought that when I’m 60 and looking back on my life, if acting hadn’t been a part of it, I would hate myself.

Every single laundromat, grocery store, everything is called ‘Lupita’ in Mexico.

I have dabbled in martial arts all my life, since I was 7, maybe – tae kwon do, capoeira, Muay Thai. It’s always been an interest because in martial arts there is a mind/body relationship.

Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet. The shame doesn’t even belong to us, but we still experience it because we’re a part of the African race. If it happened to one, it happened to all. We carry that burden.

I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.

Drama is my sweet spot, but the thing about being an actor is that you want to do a variety of things. I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.

I didn’t love my hair when I was a child. It was lighter than my skin, which made me not love it so much. I was really kind of envious of girls with thicker, longer, more lush hair.

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.

I always love to learn new things. That’s the reason I like being an actor.

I grew up in the limelight and being the child of someone famous. So my relationship with fame is not bedazzled.

There is something about acting that’s mysterious and magical because there is only so much I can do to prepare, and then I have to just let go and breathe and believe that it will come through.

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I’d been starved for images of myself. I’d grown up watching a lot of American TV. There was very little Kenyan material, because we had an autocratic ruler who stifled our creative expression.

I had moved back to Kenya after undergrad, and I went through this crisis of, ‘What is my life going to be about?’

I’m still trying to get over the fact that my name is being mentioned with people like Brad Pitt.

I grew up watching foreign programs – American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. ‘The Color Purple’ was the first time I saw people who looked like me.

I didn’t know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That’s what I did.

Our business is complicated because intimacy is part and parcel of our profession; as actors, we are paid to do very intimate things in public. That’s why someone can have the audacity to invite you to their home or hotel, and you show up.

I thrive on structure. I find my freedom in structure.

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

I have a very ostrich mentality. I feel like I have my head in the sand so no one can see me.

One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you’re not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability.

I give myself homework when I have an audition. I give myself goals, and that’s how I check how I’m doing. It can be something simple like ‘listen,’ or ‘find your feet.’ And then afterward it’s an assessment, so in a way it’s not about booking the job or not. It’s about what I learned as an actor about that character.

In the madness, you have to find calm.

To this day, I love eating steak tacos before going to the red carpets.

I loved make-believe. I was the child in the cupboard playing with my Barbies.

Home is where my family is.

My parents gave me a Mexican name. In our culture, we are named after the events of the day.

As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.

There’s always a sense of newness with acting, because every role, you come to every role fresh.

All throughout filming ’12 Years a Slave,’ there was a focus like no other. Everyone took ownership of this film and gave their all.

I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don’t have what it takes. It… keeps us honest.

I was raised in Kenya, and I always wanted to be an actor from when I was really, really little, but the first time I thought it was something that I could make a career of was when I watched ‘The Color Purple.’ I think I was nine, maybe, and I saw people that looked like me – Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah.

I am thrilled beyond words that The Academy has recognized my performance in Steve McQueen’s ’12 Years a Slave,’ and I am deeply proud to be in the company of my fellow nominees.

I don’t need to be so full of myself that I feel I am without flaw. I can feel beautiful and imperfect at the same time. I have a healthy relationship with my aesthetic insecurities.

I learned at Yale, one of the biggest lessons was to learn how special I am and therefore how totally unspecial I am. I was special among everyone else who was special. The fact that we’re all so individual and that’s what makes us special.

It’s great to have something to dress up for. You know, I spent three years in slacks at drama school, so now I like putting a dress on.

Makeup isn’t something I’ve worn a lot of in my life.

Being a part of ’12 Years a Slave’ has been one of the most profound experiences of my life.

I have the opportunity to learn about the fashion world, and I appreciate it as an art form… But I never want it to take over my acting.

The muscles you flex in theater are muscles that you really need. I must always find a way to get back there. It’s irreplaceable.

I’m interested in generating work for myself. I have trouble with this waiting-for-the-phone-to-ring lifestyle, especially after drama school, which was so creatively fulfilling.

I thought I was going to school to be other people, but really, what I learned was to be myself – accepting myself, my strengths and weaknesses.

The Hollywood Film Awards were really stressful. It was the biggest press line I’d ever seen.

I hope we can form a community where a woman can speak up about abuse and not suffer another abuse by not being believed and instead being ridiculed.

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, ‘This girl does not even go to school.’

It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.

I am very emotional about politics in a way that makes it hard for me to articulate things in a rational fashion.

My father used to act in high school. He was in a production of ‘Othello;’ I don’t know who he played, but it wasn’t Othello. He would talk about it, though, and read Shakespeare to me.

I spent some time back in Mexico at 16 because my parents thought it would be prudent for me to learn Spanish, because I held a Mexican passport.

There have been rumors and rumors and rumors about my love life. That’s the one area that I really like to hold close to my heart.

I grew up in a world where the majority of people were black, so that wasn’t the defining quality of anyone. When you’re describing someone, you don’t start out with ‘he’s black, he’s white.’

Steve McQueen is a genius. And I think that word is overused, but I think with Steve it’s rightly used. He’s a genius.

Personally, I don’t ever want to depend on makeup to feel beautiful.

The beauty standards had nothing to do with me in Mexico. It was such a bizarre, dire time for my hair. I was living in a small town where there was not any semblance of an African community. I’d have to take the bus to Mexico City to find a woman who could braid my hair. That was two and a half hours away.

My immediate family was always very supportive. It was my own fear of the rest of the world not accepting me, the rest of our society not accepting my wish to be an actor.

I always envisioned working in film and in theater. Theater and film are not, they’re not in any way substitutable. What I love about theater is so different from what I love about film, and I enjoy the craft of both.

I come from a very close class. I lucked out because drama schools are often very competitive… I have fourteen classmates.

The first time I cut all my hair off was when I was 19. I just got fed up going to the salon every week. I’d had enough! On a whim, it was off. It’s low-maintenance.

I do my best work when I feel conviction to say something through the character I play. Always I want to have integrity and not compromise that.