Audra McDonald Quotes

You feel the communion of the collective consciousness in that moment when you’re on stage doing something and the audience is absolutely with you. And the audience becomes a collective entity as well. They come in from separate places and socio-economic backgrounds, and places across the world and days that they’ve had, and then they come together and they become one collective thing, and experience something in a collective way.

I was a little girl with a pot belly and Afro puffs, hyperactive and overdramatic, and I found the theater and I found my home.

…I tried to kill myself. It was a feeble attempt, but I did. And I got put in a mental hospital for a month, and I got myself straight and worked on my mental health…it’s nothing that I hide. It’s nothing to be proud of or to be ashamed of. It’s part of my life, you know? And I’m still here!

I think for a lot of people that are in performing arts, it’s easy to fall into the trap of starting to confuse what’s real life and what’s not, because to your body it’s all real.

I’m addicted to those moments when you’re on stage and the audience is so quiet you could hear a pin drop and you realize that you’re in communion. That’s an incredible experience. That’s a cosmic experience, as far as I’m concerned, without getting way out there.

I think a part of evolution is the desire to know yourself, and know the world you live in, and discover everything you can about the world you live in. That world can be the microcosm of your own emotions, or a society, or the cosmos. There’s this constant desire for knowledge.

The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience’s ears. It’s not the typical Southern dialect that we’re used to.

I think it’s absolutely essential to encourage creativity. I think we come in as these wide-eyed sponges, ready to create and absorb and evolve, and I think more often than not we are squashed, the older we get.

Music was all over my house, and all over literally my genetic house, and my house in the literal sense. So I kind of couldn’t avoid it.

I guess what I know now that I definitely didn’t know as a child, is that being truest to yourself is the greatest weapon in the war to achieve. That sounds really negative, but in conquering or achieving something. I think, as a child, I thought I had to be somebody else.

Every human being has a dream. I think what’s special about the American Dream is that it implies, given everything that’s happened with the history of America, that there is the opportunity to make your dream come true. So I think America signifies opportunity.

For me, I am constantly forcing myself to evolve, because, I think, to stagnate creatively – there’s a certain death that happens with that. Because if you’re not moving forward and you’re not evolving, you’re devolving, and I don’t want to go backwards. I want to be better at what I do tomorrow than I am today. I don’t want to be worse.