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.
CICELY TYSONThe 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.
More Cicely Tyson Quotes
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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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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 gratification in working comes from the preparation and the building of the character.
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I don’t think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don’t believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.
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Age is just a number. Life and aging are the greatest gifts that we could possibly ever have.
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Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew.
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One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don’t want anybody to walk ahead of me, and I don’t want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that’s how I feel about equal rights.
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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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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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We have to support our own films. If we don’t, how can we expect others to support them?
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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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The gratification comes, for me, in the doing of it. And once I’ve done it, I can’t do anything about it if it’s good or if it’s bad.
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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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You never know what motivates you.
CICELY TYSON