Viola Davis Quotes

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

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.

When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.

When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.

You can't be hesitant about who you are.

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.

I don’t want anyone putting any limits on me.

I don't have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn't love me has to say about me.

I want my work to reflect my level of gifts and talent

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.

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.

The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.

When you see what the deficit is, then you have to do something about it.

And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.

I just look at women sometimes and I just want to ask them, "Do you know how fabulous you are?"

Sometimes you see how humanity can rise above any kind of cultural ills and hate that a person's capacity to love and communicate and forgive can be bigger than anything else.

Relationships change us and make us grow.

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.

I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.

I would love to be remembered as a person who used her life to inspire others in any way, shape or form.

Anything can be achieved with a good, healthy dose of courage.

I am not a glam woman - this definitely is a mask I put on for the public.

They say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too.

It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy, to be my sexualized, to be my woman.

And this is what was fascinating to me about 'The Help'; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

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

That's how I digest it, 'cause I can press the fast-forward button and I know that I'm gonna have to continue to be an actor, continue to make choices, continue to perform in a show every week.

Any actor will tell you, as soon as your ego and your vanity come into the mix, it destroys your work. Completely destroys it.

I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.

If the opportunity is not out there for you to play it, then you don't see it.

I think that I'm coming off as the biggest alcoholic in the world.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated.

Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it's filet mignon.

I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am

It's time for people to see us, people of colour, for what we really are: complicated.

You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.

I would love to star in a remake of Thelma and Louise. Yep, that's the one I'd be interested in redoing.

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.

I can't deal with actors! I can't deal with myself. We're neurotic and miserable... I love doing what I'm doing, but while I'm doing it, I'm miserable.

I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish.

And "classically not beautiful" is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.

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.

I really wanted to show [in "fences"] a marriage that is working. Not perfect, but working.

Ultimately, it's not your job, as an actress, to satisfy people's expectations or image of who you should be. Even in your life, you are just who you are.

I am the mother of a 6-year-old now, so that's changed my entire perspective.

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

People are just not impressed by me at home.

Just because I was 30 doesn't mean I was grown. God, I was such an idiot. I was an absolute idiot at 30. And I grew up.

I've always seen myself for who I am, which is a lot of things. So, I guess that when I walk into a room, I bring all those things to a role, and I've always just simply seen myself as an actor.