Top 100 Viola Davis Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “I’ve been to acting school and I think that at the end of the day, when you just focus on the work and you’re comfortable with who you are, that at some point someone’s going to recognize your talent and give you an opportunity.”

— Viola Davis

52. “You absolutely feel, as a black actress, that you’ve got to ride the wave because there’s just so few roles. I hate to play that card, but it’s the truth. There’s not a lot of roles.”

— Viola Davis

53. “I would love to star in a remake of Thelma and Louise. Yep, that’s the one I’d be interested in redoing.”

— Viola Davis

54. “And ‘classically not beautiful’ is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.”

— Viola Davis

55. “I am not a writer, but I feel that when our production company is successful, we’ll be able to give some young writers with fresh voices an opportunity to put their work out there.”

— Viola Davis

56. “It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy, to be my sexualized, to be my woman.”

— Viola Davis

57. “Ultimately, it’s not your job, as an actress, to satisfy people’s expectations or image of who you should be. Even in your life, you are just who you are.”

— Viola Davis

58. “I want to span different genres. I want to be able to transform. I want to be able to be sexy, and funny, and quirky, and all the other things that I am. And I feel that the best way that I can achieve that is by producing.”

— Viola Davis

59. “Your only job as an artist is to put the truth out there into the world.”

— Viola Davis

60. “I think that’s something that people feel that I do really well; I don’t mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn’t want to move people?”

— Viola Davis

61. “I’ve always seen myself for who I am, which is a lot of things.”

— Viola Davis

62. “To me, it’s always a luxury to be able to work with the best of the best because they make it easier for you to do what you do.”

— Viola Davis

63. “One of the people I’ve always wanted to emulate in pursuing that dream was Meryl Streep, in terms of the different types of roles she’s been able to play and the number of different stories she’s been able to tell.”

— Viola Davis

64. “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”

— Viola Davis

65. “I am not a glam woman – this definitely is a mask I put on for the public.”

— Viola Davis

66. “Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye says that “a person’s love is only as good as the person; a stupid person loves stupidly, a violent man loves violently.”

— Viola Davis

67. “It’s harder to play a quiet character because everything happens in their stream of consciousness. They’re thinking and feeling the world, but they’re saying very little, so then you have to communicate it through your behavior.”

— Viola Davis

68. “When you see what the deficit is, then you have to do something about it.”

— Viola Davis

69. “I started a production company out of necessity, the need for great narratives for actors of color.”

— Viola Davis

70. “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past.”

— Viola Davis

71. “I can’t speak for the Kathryn Stockett, but I would guess that she feels proud of the progress the South has made because, growing up, she experienced a very different Mississippi than the one that exists today.”

— Viola Davis

72. “People are just not impressed by me at home.”

— Viola Davis

73. “That’s how I digest it, ’cause I can press the fast-forward button and I know that I’m gonna have to continue to be an actor, continue to make choices, continue to perform in a show every week.”

— Viola Davis

74. “For a whole generation of Black people we were the dream. We were their hope. We were the baton they were passing as they were sinking into the quicksand of racism, poverty, Jim Crow, segregation, injustice, family trauma, and dysfunction.”

— Viola Davis

75. “I now understand that life, and living it, is more about being present. I’m now aware that the not-so-happy memories lie in wait; but the hope and the joy also lie in wait.”

— Viola Davis

76. “When you’re working as an actor, you don’t think that when you get out of school, it’s going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don’t think that people are going to see you in a certain way.”

— Viola Davis

77. “I think that I’m coming off as the biggest alcoholic in the world.”

— Viola Davis

78. “It’s time for people to see us, people of colour, for what we really are: complicated.”

— Viola Davis

79. “It’s not anything that is just perpetuated by White America or just perpetuated by Black America. It’s just a cultural understanding that you’re just not a part of the equation when it comes to sexuality and I think that people mistake your lack of opportunity with the level of your talent.”

— Viola Davis

80. “We were “po.” That’s a level lower than poor. I’ve heard some of my friends say, “We were poor, too, but I just didn’t know it until I got older.” We were poor and we knew it.”

— Viola Davis

81. “Courage is the cure.”

— Viola Davis

82. “I needed to make my wig ogg because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am.”

— Viola Davis

83. “And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.”

— Viola Davis

84. “As soon as he came into my life, my life got better because I created a family with him, with someone who loved me. I was no longer solely defined by the family that raised me and my childhood memories.”

— Viola Davis

85. “The sentiment that I had a little trouble with was the idea that, “You change the school, you change the community.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around that.”

— Viola Davis

86. “When you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them. We’ve been stripped clean of social protocol.”

— Viola Davis

87. “It’s futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’” What have I learned from all of it? There is absolutely no way whatsoever to get through this life without scars.”

— Viola Davis

88. “Eating bread in Hollywood is a no-no!”

— Viola Davis

89. “Everything had been hard for me. I mastered hard. Now, I wanted joy.”

— Viola Davis

90. “We are after all observers of life. We are after all a conduit, a channeler of people. What you haven’t resolved in your life can absolutely become an obstacle in the work that you do.”

— Viola Davis

91. “When my dad passed, part of my heart went with him that’s never coming back. I feel the same way about Julius. I feel the same way about my child, my mom, sisters. It’s one heart. They are completely entwined in my spirit.”

— Viola Davis

92. “I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people – the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silence – in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.”

— Viola Davis

93. “That’s what he asked me next. It was a big moment for me. I said, “No, but I’m doing the work. I’m in therapy. I’ve gotta clean things up before I can invite anyone into my life to love me.”

— Viola Davis

94. “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.”

— Viola Davis

95. “I am a dark-skinned woman. Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable. All the attributes that are attached to being a woman-desireable, vulnerable, needing to be rescued-don’t apply to us. In the past we’ve been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility.”

— Viola Davis

96. “I knew my life would be a fight, and I realized this: I had it in me.”

— Viola Davis

97. “Success pales in comparison to healing.”

— Viola Davis

98. “Being with that group of women who so easily gave up their vanity and just went for it was a huge learning curve for me.”

— Viola Davis

99. “There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being.”

— Viola Davis

100. “I answered the call to adventure...”

— Viola Davis