Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I always stand up for what I believe and what I want to. "

Forest Whitaker

Related Quotes:

" It's tough when you have to be away. But I'm probably at home more than my dad was because he was working two or three jobs sometimes. "

Forest Whitaker

" When children and youth are deprived of their right to education, their community is deprived of a sustainable future. It is all the more true with refugees. "

Forest Whitaker

" I see a deep connection between peace and change: peace always starts from within, for communities and people alike. The same is true of change: real change starts from within. "

Forest Whitaker

" It's all about destiny. That's why people look at the zodiac or the I Ching - because there's a certain order to life, and that order has been lived since the beginning of time. No matter what you do, you're going to live inside of it. "

Forest Whitaker

" I care about people. In the end, I think they feel it. It comes across, regardless of the character I'm portraying. "

Forest Whitaker

" I've had many incidents in my life of racism. I've been thrown on the ground. I've been frisked. I've been arrested so many times I couldn't tell you. I have no need to talk about it. "

Forest Whitaker

" The first time I ever went out of the country, it was to London. I was with the choir from my college, and we were touring around all these different churches. I loved it so much I tried to find a way to stay there. "

Forest Whitaker

" I think I've made some choices that maybe I wasn't so sure about for some reason or another. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Even when I was young, I played Bird, and that's a role people wait for their whole lifetime. "

Forest Whitaker

" I fell through a stage once. I was doing a truly African dance, and all of a sudden, I hit the ground with my foot and went straight through the stage. I guess they didn't have much money, so the floor was kind of rotting. "

Forest Whitaker

" Poitier opened the doors to so many artists, not just black artists. There is a line that goes from black to Latin to Asian with regards to roles. "

Forest Whitaker

" I love to play chess. The last time I was playing, I started to really see the board. I don't mean just seeing a few moves ahead - something else. My game started getting better. It's the patterns. The patterns are universal. "

Forest Whitaker

" I try to live my life in a holistic way, show that all of it intersects because I'm coming from the same place. Now, at the core of it, I'm just trying to connect and be there, so I'm trying to be there for my family, my wife, my kids, my friends. "

Forest Whitaker

" I'm always surprised when an actor goes so deeply into the truth that they shake you to your core. "

Forest Whitaker

" On the whole, I now see my work as being an expression of my spiritual life and, because I look at it that way, I have a different centre. I go through the stress and pressure, but I think I'm lucky because I come from a different source point. "

Forest Whitaker

" I stay true because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character. It's the thing that connects him to me and to everybody else. So, the search is the same. It's to unveil the truth, and that's how I stay true, because my purpose isn't altered. "

Forest Whitaker

" It's hard for me to judge my own films as an artist sometimes. But as an artist, I did feel a fulfillment working on them, you know? "

Forest Whitaker

" When we talk about the issue of child soldiers, it can be easy to focus just on ending recruitment and liberating those boys and girls who are currently being held in military camps. Obviously, both of these are incredibly important goals, but it's also essential that we not forget about former child soldiers once they are liberated. "

Forest Whitaker

" For many child soldiers, war and violence are all they have ever known. If we don't take it upon ourselves to show them an alternative, then they're going to be soldiers forever, and they'll continue to be recruited and to participate in violence if another conflict starts five or 10 years down the road. "

Forest Whitaker

" I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing... Kids would tease me, calling me 'Little Bush.' But... I thought being called Forest helped me find my identity. "

Forest Whitaker

" My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I'd prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She's pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She's really taught me how to celebrate life; that's something I've learned. "

Forest Whitaker

" The characters I've portrayed may outwardly be quite different from one another, but I've found that they're also intrinsically linked. "

Forest Whitaker

" I think I didn't know whether I wanted to keep acting deep into my career. I kept trying to see if I would be able to do it well enough to make that part of my destiny or part of what I was supposed to do. "

Forest Whitaker

" I had been playing really interesting roles before I got great roles. Little ones - 'The Crying Game' I loved working on, and then 'Bird,' 'Ghost Dog,' so many films. "

Forest Whitaker

" As an actor, I've always wanted to do characters that would help me find my connection with others and connect all of us together. You always want the energy of the character, the spirit of the person, to enter you. I've been doing this for 26 years and some of the things I've done are always with me. "

Forest Whitaker

" I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects. "

Forest Whitaker

" I'm fascinated by the capacity to be able to do harm. I struggle every day with the ability of people to do evil. Not just the big things - the petty things that people do in order to make someone feel small, when it's so easy to do, and it hurts so much. "

Forest Whitaker

" I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that. "

Forest Whitaker

" As human beings, we all have reasons for our behavior. There may be people who have certain physiological issues that dictate why they make certain choices. On the whole, though, I think we're dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy? "

Forest Whitaker

" I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be. "

Forest Whitaker

" I've been fortunate, I guess: I've gotten to play a lot of very diverse roles for quite a long time. But in the beginning, I was thinking, 'I'm not gonna do certain characters. I will be willing to say no and live on a couch.' And I was really happy. "

Forest Whitaker