Viola Davis Quotes

I try to give each performance my own soul, to bring a truth to my character. Hopefully, when I bring that much truth to a character, it resonates with somebody, and it sparks some kind of emotion in them.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

It's all you want as an actor: to have a story people want to be told.

I wish to continue to essay roles that will help me find my place in the audience's hearts.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

As an actor, that's the most that you can hope for - not only being part of a story, but being part of a story that matters.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

On so many levels, acting in film and TV is so much the sum of its parts, and somewhere in there, there's an alchemical thing that makes something happen or not - that makes something connect or not. Now, of course you want to make work that people see, but the enjoyment I get out of acting is playing characters.

As an actress I just want to tell beautiful stories.

You can keep yourself alive. That's the magic of being an actor.

As an actor, what you dream of is being able to portray people that people empathize with and understand and really feel for.

The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life.

Whether it's a very dramatic part or a comical role, I feel I need to create the same thing: a full-fledged, three-dimensional character that the audience can identify with.

Everything that I am going to do as an actress doesn't matter where it's coming from. It just has to be interesting.

As an actress, my ultimate goal is to create a universal experience in my acting.

Whatever I do, no matter it's for television, web or the big screen - it should satisfy me as an actor.

I'd love to star in dark drama that audiences could really relate to.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.