Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "As actors, you become an expert at starting over."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "I would love to have a career that's governed by the material; I always want to be part of stories that I feel are worthwhile."

Nyong'o: "That's such a powerless place for me to think about: what is working against me. I don't think of what I don't have; I think of what I do and use that to get the next thing."

Nyong'o: "I always love to learn new things. That's the reason I like being an actor."

Nyong'o: "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."

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

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "I want to be uncomfortable - acting is uncomfortable."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands, but clay can be art in the right hands."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "I thrive on structure. I find my freedom in structure."

Nyong'o: "What fame does is there is an illusion of familiarity that is cast into the world. So it's about negotiating with that illusion because, oftentimes, you encounter people who have encountered you, but you haven't encountered them. It's a little weird to find your footing."

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

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "There's always a sense of newness with acting, because every role, you come to every role fresh."

Nyong'o: "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."

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

Nyong'o: "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."

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

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "I loved make-believe. I was the child in the cupboard playing with my Barbies."

Nyong'o: "It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience."

Nyong'o: "Human beings have an instinct for freedom."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "I feel privileged that people are looking up to me, and perhaps a dream will be born because of my presence."

Nyong'o: "As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally."

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

Nyong'o: "I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying, 'We don't have work for black women.'"

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "In the madness, you have to find calm."

Nyong'o: "The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other to tell this story. We also knew we needed to hold each other up as we told the story."

Nyong'o: "Dreams are the foundation of Hollywood. And dreams are the foundation of America."

Nyong'o: "When I was younger, I was almost too afraid to admit that I wanted to be an actor. 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."

Nyong'o: "We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty."

Nyong'o: "I never understood who all those people are behind the actors! When you see them on the red carpet on TV, you go, 'Why does that person need such a large entourage?' And then you realize that every single person there has a role to play."

Nyong'o: "What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "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."

Nyong'o: "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."