Viola Davis Quotes

I always knew I wanted to be an actress, and I had the attitude that I would learn more under people like Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne or Mike Myers than from someone who had never starred in a movie. I just didn't think that someone who had never been in a movie could teach me how to act in one.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

From an acting point of view you need to look at what you're bringing in.

As an actor, you always find your way. You have whatever preparation techniques you use, and you just go with the scene when you're on set. You can only plan so much when you're working, because things have to come naturally in the scene.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

Vary the pace... is one of the foundations of all good acting.

I do my independent stuff where it's real acting if you like. Intense, drama stuff. I love me actions.

What I love to do requires portraying different characters, and you have to separate your life from the role.

Having a guy on a microphone yelling lines at you is counter to a lot of acting techniques.

I was a student of Stella Adler and then later Lee Strasberg, and they were into sensory work. At its best, acting is not about words - even when the words are important.

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

Each action of the actor on the stage should be the visible concomitant of his thoughts.

Being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that we are none of us perfect.

My job as an actor is to live the role that I do.

Actresses cannot have any inhibitions while portraying bold characters. It is something that we learn on the first page of the book on acting.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

I believe an actor should be shameless.

I often have the feeling that acting is really not difficult, because all I do is I just listen. I just listen. I just listen to what there is. And if there's nothing, then I listen to nothing. If there's a chair, and it's empty, I listen to an empty chair, and I will respond to it.

It certainly helps, I think, with some actors to understand the process of acting. You see what extraordinary pressure they're under, there's a huge circus dedicated to a particular moment and they're got to deliver and it can help that you, even if empathetically alone, understand what they're doing.

I know people think that acting is not quite the occupation of grown-ups, but it is actually the ultimate learning process: You get a multitude of experiences, all for the price of one life.

I think actor is one of those jobs where you don't stop learning, even if you have a career longer than my little five years! You're meeting new people all the time, so you might as well just be a sponge and take everybody's input and style as a bit of a lesson.

With acting, there are a lot of subtleties and non-verbals involved. If someone is over there, getting eaten by a shark, there's a non-verbal way of how to act that. There's a certain nuance to acting that does not come intuitively to me. It's something I still have to learn.

I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.

I'm not going back to acting class, although I've thought of it. The classic training that people get usually when they start out, I never had, and I always felt and still feel the lack of it, so there's a lot of basic stuff that I just don't have a clue about.

(Acting) is an extension of life. How you're capable of performing in your life, that's how you're capable of performing on screen.