Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.

In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.

I am not myself; I am the potential of myself.

People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.

I am interested in personal stories because that's when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.

If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.

Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial.

Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.

Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

Art simply can’t be stopped.

Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance.

You know, interesting minds usually do hold more than one idea at a time.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.

I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

If you say a word often enough it becomes you.

I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to.

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

What my work is, is my approach to it. It's the practice. And my work is about the effort that I make to get there. And I think if there's anything artistic, it's in that middle space.

Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.

My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.

Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.