Audra McDonald Quotes

I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now. That it's not about the celebrity status that you receive because you're doing the next hot movie. It's about doing good work.

All artists are people of growth. It's like food, you take the good and leave the rest.

I absolutely refuse the fame part of my business. I refuse even the money side of my business. I try to do as good work as I can do, I try to grow in my art and reach for truth. That's what I want from my art, that's what I aspire to.

You're not going to do good work if you're not choosing something because it inspires you.

I try to do things I love or care about for some reason.

I really like doing good work and working with good people - that's the thing that drives me.

When I am making music, I am growing at the same time, ain't I?

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

It's much nicer to be praised than to be damned. But you have to have a certain sense of your own priorities and ideas about what works and what doesn't because otherwise, if you're just looking for eternal validation all the time, you can be motivated by the wrong things and I don't think it's as personally satisfying in your own work.

Dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.

I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life's set prize.

Sometimes I try to beat other people's achievements but on many occasions I find it's better to beat my own achievements. That can give me more satisfaction. I don't feel happy if I am comfortable. Something inside me pushes me when I get comfortable. It makes me go farther and I want to keep pushing.

You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.

I always want to be the best at what I do. As a kid, whatever I was doing, if I was playing football or whatever I was applying my energy to at the time, I always wanted to do it to the best of my abilities. And I was always interested in finding out how I could do it better.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work

The moment I made that decision to get in the studio and actually work and study the culture of hip-hop, then everything just started to open up and blossom for me.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

Never try to be better than somebody else. But most importantly, never cease trying to be the best you can be.

Others can inspire you, but ultimately the only thing that empowers you is what lies within you and learning how to better utilize what you’ve been given.

Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. Until your Good is Better, and your Better is your Best.

I require myself not to be equal to the best, but to be better then the bad.

My goal is to help women to become the best version of themselves.

If you think you're perfect already, then you never will be.

It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about what's "too much" what's "enough" or if you're telling the "right" stories, just do good work.