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It's always hard to be private in public, which is what acting is because you have to do thing really emotionally naked.
Viola Davis
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Viola Davis
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 11
Actress
Film Actor
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Television Producer
St. Matthews
South Carolina
La Viola Davis
Public
Acting
Hard
Thing
Really
Always
Emotionally
Naked
Private
More quotes by Viola Davis
If the opportunity is not out there for you to play it, then you don't see it.
Viola Davis
I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.
Viola Davis
We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.
Viola Davis
August [Wilson] elevates in us is the average man in a way that is heroic and real and human. What you do is you sit with our pathology, you invest in our humanity. We're not walking around like walking symbols like we mean something larger. We're just moving throughout our lives and that's the power of the piece. That's revolutionary.
Viola Davis
Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.
Viola Davis
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.
Viola Davis
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.
Viola Davis
It's harder to play a quiet character because everything happens in their stream of consciousness. They're thinking and feeling the world, but they're saying very little, so then you have to communicate it through your behavior.
Viola Davis
I was like, 'What is this?' Until I found out it was stress related. That's how I internalized it. I don't do that anymore. My favorite saying in the world is, 'The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.' I am telling you, I have spent so much of my life not feeling comfortable in my skin. I am just so not there anymore.
Viola Davis
I have a lot of spiritual books that I read that I really, really love - everything from the Bible to Joseph Campbell, who I love. He wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces. It's about exploring what is heroic in you. It helps me a lot.
Viola Davis
Relationships change us and make us grow.
Viola Davis
When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.
Viola Davis
I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.
Viola Davis
When a director can give you a word that allows you to feel less tense about yourself, to make you feel like you indeed are good enough before you even get to the work, you can't ask for anything more than that.
Viola Davis
Lloyd Richards is another director who was like that, who was a teacher.
Viola Davis
Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.
Viola Davis
Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.
Viola Davis
[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.
Viola Davis
It's not anything that is just perpetuated by White America or just perpetuated by Black America. It's just a cultural understanding that you're just not a part of the equation when it comes to sexuality and I think that people mistake your lack of opportunity with the level of your talent.
Viola Davis
I think that's why August [Wilson] named her Rose [in Fences] I really do. She's a rose in her sweetness and her kindness and in everything else, even her anger towards the end.
Viola Davis
