Viola Davis Quotes
As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.
Quotes to Explore
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Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.
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My house looks like it was decorated by a 14-year old with a platinum American Express card.
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The life of an actor is never one to get comfortable.
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There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.
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If someone says, 'I love that lipstick,' I will always try to answer, honestly, if I know what color it is. It's a connective tissue.
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Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee are two Asian directors I'm really fond of.
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One of the things I love about acting is that I can enter into these other people's lives. But going back to being me at the end of the day is very important, too. That process of remembering who I am.
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I just love France, I love French people, I love the French language, I love French food. I love their mentality. I just feel like it's me. I'm very French.
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That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.
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Most people who went about saying a ghost had poked them with a brolly would be locked up somewhere.
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Chanting was very deep for me. It was as if I remembered it. It was like a real surrender.
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Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
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Hopefully in the future, generational challenges will be measured by achievement, not gender.
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We should not give up and we should not allow the problem to defeat us.
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With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive.
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I made a very conscious decision to quit acting. I was on a series, and we were in the process of renegotiating. They had an idea of what they thought I was worth, and I had an idea that was quite different.
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I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?
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Know your priorities and identify the five powerful action steps that you intend to take to move your initiatives forward each day. If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day, it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually, the tree has to fall down.
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I've had experiences where I wasn't allowed to change words around at all because you have to say everything, exactly as written on the page. That's not fun for me. For me, part of being an actor is being able to contribute to a character's rhythms. If there's room to explore, you find a happy medium.
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My husband's a man's man, and he does guy films, and there's rarely any female parts in them, period, but we have some projects that are for me that we hope to do in the near future.
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It's no secret that I wear a kippa.
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I feel that I can't do certain things that have sent to me, scripts, because I think that really - I've been June Cleaver for so many years, because we went back, you know, and we did - 20-year hiatus we had - and we went back and made 105 new ones. And so I really feel very strongly that there are certain things I won't do.
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I went to an art high school in Washington D.C., and I majored in visual art. When I started there, I was horrible - couldn't draw, couldn't sketch, couldn't do anything. I remember at one point I came to terms with the fact that I had to work my ass off to do well and that's exactly what I did. I drew and drew and drew, and it worked - I ended up getting the award for best artist and went on to apply to design school because I loved it so much. I think it really speaks to the idea that you can in fact excel at whatever you put your mind and your heart to.
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As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.
