When a director can give you a word that allows you to feel less tense about yourself, to make you feel like you indeed are good enough before you even get to the work, you can't ask for anything more than that.

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.

I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.

I think watching my mom gave me great inspiration, I wish that had been reinforced more verbally. It would have kept me from a lot of pain.

I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you.

When Denzel [Washington] first called me on the phone after we'd just done a reading of the film ["Fences"]. He said, "Oh Viola it was so good, wasn't it?! I'm gonna tell Russell [Hornsby] to lose a little bit of weight and..." I was just sitting there thinking, why is he calling me? And I told him, "Denzel don't you tell me to lose weight!" He said, "I'm not telling you to lose weight! I can't believe you would say that."

And "classically not beautiful" is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.