Viola Davis Quotes
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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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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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My first wedding was 15 people at our condo. The second was maybe about a hundred people at this fabulous casino. And you know what? I have almost no pictures of the second one, because I put disposable cameras on the tables, because everyone said, "The best pictures are the most candid! The best pictures are the ones people just take!" So, I put disposable cameras on the tables, and guess what? There were so many kids there that those cameras were stomped on. I had so many pictures of the floor, of people's eyes, of someone's finger.
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I am not a writer, but I feel that when our production company is successful, we'll be able to give some young writers with fresh voices an opportunity to put their work out there.
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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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That is a huge need for a lot of women, even in 2016. You can have the most ambitious career woman, and at the end of the day, she's like, 'I just want to be a mom.
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I have to say, doing theater, that's what you're trained to do. Doing film, when I first started doing it, felt like something else entirely. It felt like the difference between, I don't know, waiting tables and painting a great work of art. It's night and day. I didn't feel like it was even acting.
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I am addicted to any facial product that's anti-aging.
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I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish.
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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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That's why there's so much bad acting out there, because you could see actors watching themselves.
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[Denzel Washington] was rustling with something and when he came back it was with a word about loving myself and the body that I'm in because I was still going on and on about the weight thing. I just liked that, because what people don't understand is that so much of what blocks us as actors is so personal.
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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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And "classically not beautiful" is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.
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We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.
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I am the mother of a 6-year-old now, so that's changed my entire perspective.
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[Meryl Streep] just sent me an email, and I was like, "That's perfect." She was like, "Yes, Viola, now that you've just had your vow renewal...this is the best part of your life now. There's not anything that you don't know anymore in terms of what's good and bad out there, so now you can just fly." She's always imparting wisdom like that.
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You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.
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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 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.
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It was hard, that confrontation scene [in "Fences"], that was a hard one. I felt like it was relentless, I never felt like I could just drop the ball when the coverage was on him or anything else.
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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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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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I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am