A Quote by Cicely Tyson

In my early years, there were a number of experiences that made me decide I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were a number of issues I wanted to address. And I wanted to use my career as a platform.
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 went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
They could have given me any number. They could have given me number one-hundred one. The number is nothing. I could have played my whole career without a number on my back, and it still wouldn't have changed the person.
We watched these auditions and could only pick one. Sometimes we would add new characters 'cause we wanted to use another actress. There were so many people who were just waiting for something like this.
I started from B-grade films, and today I'm the number one actress of this country... whereas other actresses, whom you might call my contemporaries, they have had no growth in whatever platform they were launched... they are still there and have not risen to another platform.
A growing number of young women who have the freedom to decide have decided that career can wait, and the delicious early years of their children's lives can't.
I have a very close friend who is a brilliant clown, and I always wanted to do a show with him. So I did one year at La MaMa Theatre. I had not done stilts before that show, and I had about two weeks to learn how to do that, and they were just made with off-off Broadway money. The ones that I had in Rogue One were made by [Industrial Light & Magic]. So they were really easy. They were made with actual prosthetic feet on the bottom. They were athletic, in a way. I could run in them. There was a bounce to them that I could use.
I always wanted to be the best I could be at whatever I did. I didn't want to be the number one golfer in the world. I just wanted to be as good as I could be.
As far as producing, once we started shooting, I soon realized where the critical decisions about the movies were really being made, and it wasn't on the set. They were being made in the production meetings. That's where producing a movie happens. And that's where I wanted to be. I didn't just want to be a piece, a pawn being played. I wanted to take part in the creative process, and that's how I sort of got introduced to the idea.
We wanted a musical number that would capture the exhilaration of being out on a boat as they were and sailing with the stars and all that. So that's the origin of We Know the Way. From very early on we said, for an audience that doesn't know this, what we need a song that can really have the kind of sweep and the, you know, pull you in. So that was early on, we conceived of like that should be a musical moment [in Maona].
Things like, people saying the new album would debut at number one on the Billboard Charts in the U.S. and I said, "No it's gonna be number Three." Because Number 3 is a very powerful number on the album. It's repeated quite often. Then it did chart an Number 3. Was it a coincidence you decide. If your in touch with your subconscious, you can really use it to your advantage
Dad and Mom were frustrated artists - Dad wanted to study engineering or architecture and Mom wanted to be an actress - but the world was a different place when they were young so Dad became a public works foreman and Mom became a stay-at-home mom. When I said I wanted to be a writer, they were thrilled. They did everything in their power to support me.
I wanted to be different. I wanted to address everyone. I wanted to address the hood, but also the people that was getting money. I wanted to address the men and women, the kids and the adults.
They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."
In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.
I really wanted to address different issues of protection of biodiversity, water management issues that I knew were pretty severe in most countries, and then of course climate change.
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