I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.
CICELY TYSONI don’t condemn anyone for making their choices. If someone chooses those roles, fine. But not for me. When someone stops me and says, You’re the reason I became an actress, that lets me know I made the right decision.
More Cicely Tyson Quotes
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We have to support our own films. If we don’t, how can we expect others to support them?
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I didn’t want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us – I was the middle child – and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.
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How do you project a character if you don’t have a sense of where she is from? I’ve always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.
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I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there’s nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.
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I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.
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Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew.
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I don’t condemn anyone for making their choices. If someone chooses those roles, fine. But not for me. When someone stops me and says, You’re the reason I became an actress, that lets me know I made the right decision.
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One lady told me that before she saw ‘Sounder’ she didn’t believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.
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You never know what motivates you.
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Now, I am perfectly willing to just enjoy my career by choosing roles simply because I consider them to be a challenge and doing the best possible job I can.
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When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can’t live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that’s the juice that kept me going.
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My mother was an introvert and quite religious. And we were brought up in the church. And when she learned that I wanted to act, she simply said: ‘You cannot live here and do that.’
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Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here.
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My gratification in working comes from the preparation and the building of the character.
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The choices of roles I made had to do with educating and entertaining. And as a result I found myself working only every two or three years.
CICELY TYSON