Whoopi Goldberg Quotes

Emotional messiness is my reason for life. In acting, it's so important.

As an actress, emotions are my business, my stock-in-trade. As such, I've dealt with them nearly all my life.

An actor's job is to embrace emotions and situations that in real life we spend all of our time running away from.

There's a reason why I do anxious characters - it comes from a lot of personal anxiety. The great thing is, having that history, it's really fun to bring that into the characters... and play with it.

I think a lot of actors feel like outsiders or miscreants. This profession provides an opportunity to play out all the different parts of ourselves.

The stage is like a magnifier of thoughts and emotion and vibration; that's what the stage is incredible for because it makes you live other lives. It makes you experience other emotions. It makes you feel more beautiful or more alone or more angry. It makes you feel much more, more, more.

It turns out I do okay just playing an angry self-righteous woman.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor. Whatever people are struggling with, the struggle is often where the drama is.

Marlon [Brando] showed me that you could do the work and not have to shut yourself off from people or your family.

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.

I play enough other mad people, as well and some sane people, to vary the palette of what's scrabbling around in my head and soul to bring to the floor, as a storyteller.

I started acting when I was 13 years old and I feel like I really admire actors who are these kind of amazing shape-changing people, that they almost can turn themselves into other people.

On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

What I feel personally and what I can act are two different things. Maybe one of the great pleasures of my job is being able to inhabit worlds that you are never going to inhabit personally.

When I watch people like Cate Blanchett act, I don't know what is going on in her life, you just get lost in her performance and that's what I hope to do as well.

That's what acting is, it's exploring conflict.

I remember Julianne Moore talking about acting and she said, "I'm just looking for truth. When people watch, they're not looking to see me. They're looking to see themselves." That's one of my new favorite sayings

The great thing about acting is the longer you do it, the more you realize that all those realities are inside you. No matter how crazy they are, you can pretend that they are a part of you. The great thing about this job is you get to play with every aspect of your id and who you are.

Everything evolves naturally in life. It's not limited to beauty or music. The more experience you get, the more you find out about yourself. Everything becomes more and more an expression of the real you. I can play different characters. Sometimes I feel tomboy or glam or playful. When you perform, you can convey emotions differently, and your look can reflect each of those emotions.

If you're a song writer, it's a bit different because you are expressing your own words, feelings, perspective. As an actor, you are doing your best to interpret and express the root of the character's perspective which have been established by the writer. There are parallels of performing. Tapping into your own emotional piggy bank. The biggest commonality is if you are successful in either industry, you get free snacks all the time.

As an actress, I'm an emotional person.

I was always amazed the way people would come in looking one way and transform completely to the point where I couldn't recognize their language, their accent, the way they looked, their hair, their face even changed becoming so inside of the character.

I think the best models are actors, you're taking on a character. In that sense, I have been acting for a long time. It didn't seem like a crazy transition. Acting is a bigger step into modelling in a way. Modelling is easier when you don't look like yourself. When you look like a different person, you feel different. Acting goes deeper into that, you have to move and talk like that character. I love it.

Actors are professionals who deal with people's emotions and their thoughts.