Viola Davis Quotes

I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That's the smile I was smiling.

It's not like I sit around watching my movies again and again, but I've never quite believed actors when they say they don't watch themselves.

I don't think I could do what Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood or Ben Stiller do, where they direct a movie and they star in it. I would just be like, 'Oh, I don't even want to look at my face.'

I don't find it hard to direct myself. I can easily think of me as a horrible performer or a good performer. I work with actors who cannot stand watching or looking at themselves, which is not my case. I can have an eye and perspective on whether I'm terrible or good enough for me.

I don't watch my playbacks because I hate to see myself act.

One of the hardest things for me to do is watch myself. The first time I see it, I am obsessed with my left ear or my right ear or some other physical attribute, or the fact that I'm 60 or whatever shallow ego thought is running through my head. I'm just destroyed that I'm not Cary Grant or whatever.

I may be a vain person, but I'm not a vain performer.

If you go through my Instagram feed, it's like a flip book of me thinking I'm way more attractive than I am. It's nauseating.

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

Actors and actresses who say they never go to see their own pictures are talking through their hats. You don't have to be a Freud to know that the most fascinating person in the world - actors or anybody - is yourself.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

I think I'm a pretty cliché actor in that I hate watching myself on film. I don't know why it should be humbling to see yourself on film.

I think I probably think about myself as an actor, which is the way most people do. I think I'm good, I don't think I'm great. I think I would hire somebody else to play me in the movie about me.

I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.

In my younger years my dedication may have expressed itself egotistically.

I find myself fascinating.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Clearly I've got an ego.

I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

I think everybody identified at a pretty young age that I was fairly entranced with myself. And that I had to be tempered.

I'm an actor; I'm vain - you want to look good.

People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

I've always been a bit of a poser. I was chucked out of ballet lessons for looking in the mirror.