Viola Davis Quotes

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.

As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.

Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.

My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me. I never really wanted to do anything else.

We all have an escape. Mine was theater.

When I was five, I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

I always knew I wanted to be a character in the movies. When I was growing up, I had to have a lot of surgery, and I spent a lot of time recovering at home and in the hospital. Watching movies took me away from my own problems and gave me a total escape.

The thing you do is escape from them by immersing myself in the character you're playing.

Music is the reason I'm doing movies; I do credit that. But acting is an escape route for me.

Reading was my escape growing up in Ohio. Both of my parents lost their jobs when I was a teen, and it was hard. But I always had my books. Reading gave me a way of living different lives.

I like the fact that I can go away and lose myself so I don't have to live in the world of courage that everyone else does. I like creating, it's what I do, and acting allows me to stretch all those different muscles in all kinds of ways. That's pretty cool.

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to.

I was a pretty alert kid, and I, you know, I was very interested in arts.

I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.

Reading serves as a good escape when you're in the middle of doing crazy things.

Creativity is what helps me escape a lot of my inner demons.

As a child, I was always interested in drama and performance.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

As a child, one of my defense mechanisms was to try to be funny. My mom tried to nurture that by putting me in acting class. But I got bored when we stopped pretending to be trees and actually had to work.

In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it.

I need both music and acting to even think about surviving life. I don't have a choice.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.