Chiwetel Ejiofor Quotes

My worst job ever, this was when I was a kid, was picking potatoes on the back of a trailer in March. It was freezing, absolutely freezing. We had to sort the good ones from the bad ones. Once you do that for a day in March in the north of England, it makes you think there must be better jobs than this!

I pulled cotton at 6 years old and worked on the peanut farm and paper route.

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton.

Playing golf is not hot work. Cutting sugar cane for a dollar a day - that's hot work. Hotter than my first wrist watch.

The blacks have their parties, hustle a little liquor, get some things together, and I used to play for those peoples. They'd come get me on time, but they wouldn't bring me back on time... Done picked cotton all day, play all night long, then pick cotton all day the next day before I could get a chance to sleep.

Everyone must hoe his plot daily.

I get my sticks and go out to the shed, and I pound on that drum like it was my boss's head.

It's so fun to play something that feels reckless - not all the time, but I really must be acting out something that I can't do in real life.

I prefer to channel my problems and inner demons through a character. Another persona. That protects me and my family. I can get my frustrations out that way.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

The hardships of forced marches are often more painful than the dangers of battle

The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.

Aren’t you ever satisfied? I swear if I were mortal, I’d be limping from our last go-round. If not dead. We really need to find you a hobby other than jumping on top of me. (Acheron)

I'm the most mellow person offstage. I think it's just, going onstage lets me get out some frustration that I'm too shy to do in real life. Instead of doing it in private, I'd rather do it in front of 1,000 people who've paid $25 to see me lose my mind.

If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing.

I just want to scream: "I'm being honest, I swear!" Maybe it's embarrassing, but I don't care anymore.

A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I hoed it! I've dug in it! I've sprayed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!

There's little in taking or giving, There's little in water or wine: This living, this living, this living, Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent flop, And work is the province of cattle, And rest's for a clam in a shell, So I'm thinking of throwing the battle - Would you kindly direct me to hell?

Tennis can be a very frustrating sport. There is no way around the hard work. Embrace it. You have to put in the hours because there is always something you can improve. [Y]ou have to put in a lot of sacrifice and effort for sometimes little reward but you have to know that, if you put in the right effort, the reward will come.