Quotes About Inspiration

It was never easy being Cicely Tyson. And it will not be easy being Octavia or Viola Davis.

I love Viola Davis.

I saw 'The Help' on DVD. I was blown away by Viola Davis: she really straddled that fine line in the plot between what was tragic and what was heart-warming.

Viola Davis, Patti Smith, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Julianne Moore. I could go on forever listing names. However... my greatest inspirations have, without a doubt, been my teachers, friends, and family.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

I love Viola Davis. I call her 'Queen.' I think she's phenomenal. She's so raw and so bold. When I first saw her was in 'Doubt,' and she just changed everything for me. Her performance was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I think she's phenomenal.

Viola Davis is incredible - she's kind of the biggest career-wise inspiration for me. Brilliant actor, so intelligent, so strong. The path that she's made is incredible.

I would absolutely love to do something with Viola Davis or Meryl Streep. I just think both of those women fall so deep into their characters that you are no longer looking at the actresses, you are looking at the characters they embraced.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.

I know I didn't want to get caught up in the cycle of drugs and violence that was around me. Deep down inside, I felt there was something better outside the situation I was in.

Listen, I come from the most screwed-up dysfunctional situation. You've got violence. Police at your house. Your dad's gone. Nowhere to live. I want people to know, if I can make it, anybody can make it.

I didn't know that I could be an actor until I was 25 years old, and now I continue to go back to the prisons and probation camps and the inner city to say that you don't have to go through the violence, through the trauma like I did.

I lived in Complexo do Alemao until I was 12, dealt with domestic violence in my childhood and faced difficulties in life.

I hate violence, and I didn't plan to write horror; it just poured out of me.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

Most of the art I have is more on the beautiful side than the violent or disturbing side.

It has become a crusade of mine to demonstrate that TV need not be violent to be exciting.

If a violent act towards a woman takes place, and the inspiration for that act is violence in cinema, the inspiration for that act would have come from somewhere else if movies didn't exist.

Knowing that we were doing good work and the stories were good. They were original and charming. They weren't particularly violent or sexy or any of that. They were just unique and that had a good feel to it.

My father was a soldier. He was a frogman in the special forces in Denmark before I was born, and always the reality of that inspired me. My mom is very left-wing, classic socialist, and she always talked about the solders as almost crazy, violent, sick people, and I want to confront that because its very judgmental, and I'm not sure it's true.

The threat here focuses primarily on troubled souls in America who are being inspired or enabled online to do something violent for ISIL.

My music is violent, but not all of it. I have songs about God, my kids, and telling other people's kids to chill out and go to school and do right.

Violet is my everything. She's the sweetest little girl in the whole world. She inspires me. I'm glad that we have such a close relationship because she makes me laugh and shows me how great life can be every day.