Viola Davis Quotes

No one can pigeon-hole me because I play everything, and I did that on purpose.

I'm just an entertainer, man. I don't like to pigeonhole myself to anything. I love to do it all.

It's a blessing as an artist to express myself - whether that be via dance, via song or via speech - in so many different ways.

I'm a lot of things at once. I want my audience to choose the side they like most about me.

I choose roles that are not me.

I'm putting everything on the line in being able to express myself in a different way than rappers normally do. They might say, 'It's rap' or 'It's R&B,' but I'm stepping outside the box and making music for me and making music for the fans to understand me. I'm going the extra distance to be able to come across different.

That's that Dungeon Family ethos: being able to reinvent yourself, stand out and stand alone. Having your own character and having your own image, no matter what they say about you. I want to show my versatility and how diverse I am, how I approach the track, my rhythm, my melodies. It's something different.

I never want to be just one thing - I want to be multidimensional.

Art should never be limited - the beauty of art is that it gives us the freedom to go places where we wouldn't go to in our normal lives. Inside, I'm just so many different people. I go from the pretty girl on the red carpet to the singer at Ozzfest, spitting in the crowd. That's Jada.

The Lux girl is every girl as far as I'm concerned. She can be shy, confident, boisterous, elegant, or clumsy.

I like producing myself, I like other people producing, I just like it all.

If I'm inspired to make a certain kind of song, I'm going to make that kind of song, no matter if it's what they know me as or think I am.

I think one of the things that really endeared me to people was that people got to view more aspects of my personality than most because of the different things that I did within WWE.

I love looking completely different and that my fans won't always know what I'm going to do.

Even if it's such a lowly art as TV, you've got to get stuff off your chest, because that's what makes something different and original, your particular take on stuff.

You can be zany and funny or you can do something that really has some depth to it and serious, so there's many different colors to paint with. I would hate to get trapped in one little thing. I always feel like funny is an appendage, but it is not my whole body.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

The number one thing for me is diversity. I always want to ensure that people can't put me in a box. I can play a bad guy, I can play a good guy, I can play a good bad guy, I can be the host of a show, I can be serious, and I can be funny.

As actors you don't want to have one label. You'd rather have seven.

As an actor, director or writer you never want to be doing one thing. To show that diversity and be able to do more than one thing, and to play different characters, is part of the job that I'm supposed to do. Hopefully, I can continue doing that.

Apparently God makes us all different. Some of us are happy to respond to His individual touch on our lives by remaining individuals, and others of us are intimidated or frightened into trying to become like each other so that we have company, so that we don't feel so lonely.

Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.

The one place where I'm allowed to rebel, and the one place where I'm allowed to not worry about censoring myself is my music.

When I look at comedy, it's all self-expression. I apply that same method to my music. I came up listening to N.W.A and Snoop. Like them, it's in me to express how I feel. You might like it or you might not, but I take that stand.

Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say.