Last week, I covered some excerpts from Viola Davis’s excellent New York Magazine interview, her first interview since that awful New York Times “angry black woman” piece was published. Viola’s quotes were amazing and we had a nice discussion. As it turns out, Viola had a lot more to say about, well, everything. This week, Vulture published a second article framed as “A 14 Step Guide to Happiness From Viola.” They included even more great quotes, and you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

On the “angry black woman” NYT article: “We need to use the same adjectives as we use for any woman. Which could be dangerous, too, but I’ll accept that. Any day. Shonda Rimes is not an ‘angry black woman.’ There is a depth to Shonda that can’t be minimized by using just the word angry, and we use that too often to describe women of color because we don’t want to look any deeper. I see Shonda as quirky, I see her as intelligent, I see her as beautiful, I see her as feminine, I see her as a businesswoman in the juggernaut of television and a mother of three children, and a woman living in 2014. I wouldn’t reduce her to ‘angry black woman.’ Or her characters, for that matter.”

What she learned from Meryl Streep: “You could sense it was calculated, but still very organic. She would always say, ‘Is there something I could do to help you in this scene?’ If she sensed that maybe there was something I wanted to speak up about but maybe I didn’t have the clout to do it, she would do it for me. She had my back. She made it a point even in between scenes to make sure I sat with her and talked to her and shared a lot of chocolate. She eats a lot of chocolate. Dark German chocolate.” Now that Davis is in a lead role, “I always talk to all the crew. I always make it pleasant,” she says. “I always nurture a relationship that makes people feel like they’re important, like they’re a part of the collaboration. I feel that way about the young actors on set. I don’t talk to them like I’m the mentor; I talk to them like they’re my peers. And I learned that from Meryl Streep.”

Attending Julliard: “I didn’t know anyone and had to learn how to take the subway by myself. I never got care packages or money from my family. They didn’t have those resources. I had to adapt.”

When she was 28, she lost half her hair to alopecia areata: “I woke up one day and it looked like I had a Mohawk. Big splash of bald on the top of my head. I was like, What is this? Until I found out it was stress related. That’s how I internalized it. I don’t do that anymore. My favorite saying in the world is, ‘The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.’ I am telling you, I have spent so much of my life not feeling comfortable in my skin. I am just so not there anymore.”

Wearing a wig everywhere: “I wore a wig in the Jacuzzi. I had a wig I wore around the house. I had a wig that I wore to events. I had a wig that I wore when I worked out. I never showed my natural hair. It was a crutch, not an enhancement … I was so desperate for people to think that I was beautiful. I had to be liberated from that [feeling] to a certain extent.” So at the 2012 Oscars, she exposed her “natural hair.” She still has her wigs; she wears them on Murder, she wears them to photo shoots, she wears them when she doesn’t have time to pick out her hair and get rid of her grays, but she no longer wears them in her everyday life. What matters, she says, is that “it’s an option … when it used to never be an option. I had something to hide.”

Failure: “Nobody tells you about failure. People always talk about winning, vision boards, getting what you want. People also don’t talk about fear. It’s always keeping fear at bay. Squelching it. Throwing it away. I’ve embraced fear and failure as a part of my success. I understand that it’s part of the grand continuum of life. I’ve been through it all. Breakups, heartache, and I’ve lost a parent already. So now I get it at this age, I get that that is it. That life literally is what you make it.”

[From Vulture]

In case you haven’t realized it by now, Viola Davis is everything. The way she talks about failure and fear of failure and how important FAILURE is for every person’s growth, well… they need to make t-shirts with Viola’s speech. And talking about her hair falling out and how she no longer feels the need to wear wigs everywhere? She’s just…God, I don’t even have the words for how much I love her.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet, WENN.