I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.

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.

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.

Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.

Everyone said, ‘Brace yourself, Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ I didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for awards season. The red carpet feels like a war zone, except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take it.

I like to wear things, I don't like things to wear me.

It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else's.