Anna Deavere Smith quotes

Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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

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.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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

People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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
- Anna Deavere Smith

Confidence is a static state. Determination is active. Determination allows for doubt and for humility - both of which are critical in the world today. There is so much that we don’t know, and so much that we know we don’t know. To be overly confident or without doubt seems silly to me. Determination, on the other hand, is a commitment to win, a commitment to fight the good fight.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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.
- Anna Deavere Smith

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.
- Anna Deavere Smith

People realize that we're very good at sending people to war, but we're not good at taking care of them. And people are coming back from war now; years ago, they would have been killed, now they're wounded; and they're coming back alive and with post-traumatic stress. So, I think Americans are sensible enough to know we've got to figure out a way to take care of them.
- Anna Deavere Smith

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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

You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.
- Anna Deavere Smith

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.
- Anna Deavere Smith

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that’s what I love most. That’s where character lives.
- Anna Deavere Smith

I said, “Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair,” I said, “and we need a job program with stipends …” I said, “These young people really, ya know, are not in anybody’s statistics or data. They’ve been dropped off of everybody’s agenda. They live from grandmama to mama to girlfriend.” I said, “We now got young people who are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years old who have never worked a day of their lives.” I said, “These are the young people in our streets and they are angry and they are frustrated.
- Anna Deavere Smith

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair pick another profession.
- Anna Deavere Smith

You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, its hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
- Anna Deavere Smith

Discipline - both mental and physical - is crucial. We have to create our own standards of discipline.
- Anna Deavere Smith