Viola Davis Quotes
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You can't be hesitant about who you are.
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And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.
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And this is what was fascinating to me about 'The Help'; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
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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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Denzel [Washington] just knows the actor. He knows the process, and you don't often get that.
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I really want my acting to be definitive a lot of times, but I must feel like in any given moment there is a lot of things going on with Rose. I kept telling Denzel [Washington] throughout filming [Fences] that the house is her joy and her tomb.
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Creativity only resonates if you infuse real life into the work.
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My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.
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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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I haven't seen most of what I've done. I can't even list them. Most television jobs. I haven't seen a lot.
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My biggest fear is that a paparazzi or someone ... is going to come in my backyard and see me when I get in my pool. That would be very unfortunate.
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When you're really passionate, you're going to grab hold of every rope you see, and wrap them around your arms and legs to claw your way out. And that's the way I've felt in my life.
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When you're working as an actor, you don't think that when you get out of school, it's going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don't think that people are going to see you in a certain way.
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I did want to mark the fact that it was the first African-American to win the Lead Actress category.I thought it was so progressive.
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They say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too.
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I've been in this business 25 years. I've been eking out a living doing Broadway, off-Broadway... I've seen the unemployment line a lot.
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On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.
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Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it's filet mignon.
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The internal sexism within womanhood is very predominant in Hollywood, because we all want to be successful. There's a plug to it: You all have to be skinny! You all have to be pretty! You all have to be likable, because that's the formula that works. On an executive level. On a power level. And it's not always the same working with black people, because of the internalized racism. The colorism.
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In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can't seem to get there no how. I can't seem to get over that line.
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I can be busy for three years and you may not even know what I'm busy doing because you only see me in a few scenes here or there, but I've been working my tail off because there's just not a lot.
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It's harder to work with people who are not as dedicated to their craft. It also leaves you a better actor when you finish the project, since you always feel like you've learned something.
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If you're a boxer, you want to get the ring with a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali type. When you're acting, you want to get in with Meryl Streep, and that's what I did.
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I worked in television; I'm the Failed Pilot Queen, I've done so many television shows, pilots, theater ... when you do it for so long, I'm telling you, you get to the point where it becomes varied because you take what's available for a number of reasons. It's just an occupational hazard.