When I attack a role, be it TV, film or stage, the first thing I say is, I don't want to know anything. If it's good I don't want to hear it; if it's bad I don't want to hear it. The only thing either thing can do is distract me. I like to stay focused
Interpretation
Focus on the role without external opinions to maintain artistic integrity.
Cicely Tyson emphasizes the importance of maintaining focus on her work without being influenced by external opinions, whether positive or negative. By choosing to remain uninformed about the reception of her performances, she seeks to immerse herself fully in her craft, free from distractions that could hinder her artistic expression.
In practice
In a speech about artistic dedication at a theater festival.
How do you project a character if you don't have a sense of where she is from? I've always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.
I saw that I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. So I made a choice to use my career as a platform to address the issues of the race I was born into.
I don't think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don't believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.
One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don't want anybody to walk ahead of me, and I don't want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that's how I feel about equal rights.
Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here.
We have to support our own films. If we don't, how can we expect others to support them?
Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.
I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
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