Top 40 Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we’re all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise.

I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC – this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC – guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away – I’ve seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.

I’m interested when things are upside down – because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.

When you think about it, words can break your heart, or they can change your day.

Not that many people, even contemporary writers, write about right now.

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

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.

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators ‘the haute couture of language.’

I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they’re going to spend their lives.

I never know when somebody’s going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn’t have anticipated.

Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don’t want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.

Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.

There’s not a lot of flash about me.

I have never been in a violent movie or television show.

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.

Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.

President Obama called for a ‘we’ nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And that’s what we need most in our country today.

In my own life I’m frequently in predominantly white atmospheres.

I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.

I talk about race a lot. It’s been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it’s true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don’t want to see.

For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.

Suddenly in high school, I’m in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn’t have the resources to do that.

My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

That artists are called to be more responsible and ‘true’ is a tip of hat to their power.

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

I don’t talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

We owe the government taxes. We owe our creditors interest. What do these powers owe us?

I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.

I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You’re going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I’d say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.

I think it’s really important to give yourself a very big question that you’re working on that you can come home to, even if you, you know, are going to have to go without a cup of coffee or even a meal, that that should nourish you.

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after – there’s a strong respect for that in African culture.