191 Quotes by Viola Davis

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.

At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes.

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.

I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they’re still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually.

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.

You don’t get the pay-off when you’re playing a quiet character, so sometimes you want to just throw out all your work and say, “Okay, let me do something really funny or gimmicky, just so that I can get some attention in this scene.”

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.

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.

We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.