Viola Davis Quotes

'Mission: Impossible' is fun. But for myself as an artist, I'm really more concerned with the human condition, the human experience, especially from an African American point of view.

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

I like character-driven stuff that shows humanity and something that can make people think.

The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.

Sometimes you have to think about what you're going to say, in real life, so when you see that thought process going on in a movie, it feels real and looks real.

With Erin [from Paper Girls], I wanted to show what she might look like when she's 40, and I wanted it to feel authentic. In terms of inspiration I ended up using my wife for a lot of it. Just to kind of to give me almost an anchor so that I would be invested in making this character real.

You don't want the white men to be written in a three-dimensional way but the black men, not. I mean, it's just about [how] scripts should always reflect real human beings. So that's what I look for.

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

How to make a scary movie human, take a movie like Sinister. How can I make that guy so real so that the scary elements of it are more scary and it functions as a genre movie - as the way it's supposed to, you want to hear a ghost story at midnight, that's a good one - but how do you fill it up with humanity inside, in staying true to the genre? You know? Does that make sense?

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.

That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

It's been really important to me to create moments where there's a breath or moments where there's a laugh or moments where there's real life that's allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that's what does happen in life.

Well, life is dark. We live in a very dark world. When they call them "dark films" it annoys me, because they're very real stories. They're stories I have seen or experienced or witnessed, and coming from that place, that is the hope of humanity.

I think the hardest thing about the part is the responsibility that you feel playing something that is so real and resonant in our times. There are people coming home right now with those stories, and I'm just an actress pretending to be that person. You hope that you can shed some light on somebody's predicament.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.