They say the two most important days in a person’s life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.
VIOLA DAVISActing, it’s the disappearance of self, disappearance of your own needs and your own wants and the kind of embracing of the character that makes it work.
More Viola Davis Quotes
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All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn’t have to be huge and humongous.
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I would love to star in a remake of Thelma and Louise. Yep, that’s the one I’d be interested in redoing.
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Cicely Tyson was my inspiration to become an actor.
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I guess they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” because you have two stark choices when you find yourself in a really desperate situation. You can either fold and cave-in to it or you can become really passionate about getting out of it.
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I am not a glam woman – this definitely is a mask I put on for the public.
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I’ve always just simply seen myself as an actor. And I believe that it serves me well to just think in terms of my craft. If hypothetically, I saw myself only as a sex symbol, or as some other limited stereotype, I think I would feel like a complete failure.
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When you see what the deficit is, then you have to do something about it.
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One of the people I’ve always wanted to emulate in pursuing that dream was Meryl Streep, in terms of the different types of roles she’s been able to play and the number of different stories she’s been able to tell.
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I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am
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You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.
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It’s time for people to see us, people of colour, for what we really are: complicated.
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I want my work to reflect my level of gifts and talent.
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They say, ‘To serve is to love,’ and I think to serve is to heal, too.
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That’s how I digest it, ’cause I can press the fast-forward button and I know that I’m gonna have to continue to be an actor, continue to make choices, continue to perform in a show every week.
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Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes – that’s what it is, as an actor.
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Self-deprecation is not an answer to keeping one’s balance. I think that it’s very damaging.
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I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish.
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Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It’s always the unspoken word and what’s happening behind someone’s eyes that makes it so rich.
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Ultimately, it’s not your job, as an actress, to satisfy people’s expectations or image of who you should be. Even in your life, you are just who you are.
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Knowing the only way out is education, even if you don’t have parents that are extraordinarily wealthy. I understand that I have to be an active participant in [my daughter’s] education in order for her to thrive in the world.
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We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
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When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.
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At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes.
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I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.
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I would love to be remembered as a person who used her life to inspire others in any way, shape or form.
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Sometimes you see how humanity can rise above any kind of cultural ills and hate that a person’s capacity to love and communicate and forgive can be bigger than anything else.
VIOLA DAVIS