Quotes by Chiwetel Ejiofor

"I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive."

"Friends at school were always quite shocked that we holidayed in Nigeria, but it was all pretty middle-class, really."

"When I first had my eyebrows waxed, I was pretty disturbed."

"I enjoy doing everything, comedy and drama. I just look for the characters really and what they offer."

"Depending on what your interest in theater is, I always recommend working on plays. It's a great way to be introduced to the field, and also a great way to be seen by agents and representation. I'm also a great advocate for studying acting at a drama school or a college."

"There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it."

"I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously."

"It's a weird thing when you spend your life trying to find these great scripts and great parts. You are reading scripts, you are traveling the world, you are hassling your agent. You are trying to find that script."

"We always want to live in an environment where there's no artificial block to good work."

"I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one."

"I don't tend to offer up a critique unless I have a clearly formulated alternative, because there's nothing worse than people on a set or any kind of artistic life who critique something but who don't have anything to offer."

"I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater."

"David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing."

"The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer."

"It's hard to tell the story if you're not involved yourself, emotionally."

"If you're looking at people like Patrice Lumumba, you are looking at people who had a very definite plan, and events overran them."

"I was attracted to 'Half of a Yellow Sun' because of the story."

"Different people approach the universe in different ways, but they also approach their own expectations in different ways."

"The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines."

"This is going to sound completely absurd, but I do sometimes feel like the enjoyment of an awards ceremony or the pride in the finished article hasn't ever surpassed the joy of doing the work, of making it. The doing it is really the bit I'm there for."