Viola Davis Quotes

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene, and then you put it to bed, and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling in a way.

I was told that, when 'Betrayal' was being produced by one of the provincial companies in England, the two actors playing those roles actually went into a pub one day and played that scene as if it were really happening to them. The people around them became very uncomfortable.

I'd done two years on a soap opera where I was shooting things every day and they gave me a hard time about that, which I think is the wrong way to teach a young actor. They just made me really, really self-conscious about everything I did, which is the opposite of what you need to be when you're filming.

Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point.

Filming is physically and emotionally hard, especially acting in something like this, where we go into the honest feelings of these people. But it's also very exciting because there's an adrenaline that's pumping (through you) when you're doing these scenes.

Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.

I had a really weird moment when I was doing ADR, and I was watching a sex scene that I was in. I had this really detached moment where I realized I was looking at my own behind in third person.

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.

I was given the gifts of the artist, and the trouble that goes with them: So I have that blessing, and there was never a time thatI questioned it or doubted it.... For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows.

I can't really believe that it's over. "I'll speak for her." Every face turns to where Sean Kendrick stands a little apart from the crowd, his arms crossed. "This island runs on courage, not blood," he says. His face is turned towards me, but his eyes are on Eaton and his groups. In the hush after he speaks, I can hear my heart thudding in my ears.

Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.

You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

Something clenched in my chest, and for a moment, the whole world narrowed down to the green of his eyes.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

I was crying and laughing, snuffing tears and blood, bumping at him with my bound hands, trying awkwardly to thrust them at him so that he could cut the rope. He quit grappling, and clutched me so hard against him that I yelped in pain as my face was pressed against his plaid. He was saying something else, urgently, but I couldn’t manage to translate it. Energy pulsed through him, hot and violent, like the current in a live wire, and I vaguely realized that he was still almost berserk; he had no English.

Do you have to have emotional turmoil to create music? I'm not sure because I've never been without it

There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.

Love cannot exist in peace, it will always come accompanied by agonies, ecstasies, intense joys and profound sadnesses.

I think one of the things I always loved about the comics was this idea that this character, when he goes berserk, that white, blind rage makes him incredibly powerful, but it's also a great flaw. It's almost like he loses consciousness of what he's doing. During that he can do great damage.

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

The first love is the difficult love.