Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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You know, all kinds of people inspire me.
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I have a lot of optimism about new doctors because I think it's really clear that it's a lot of hard work and no guarantee of a lot of money.
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I write plays about big, intense subjects.
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I mean, I think a healthy country is a country where people are healthy physically, and a smart country is a country where people are educated.
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Each person has a literature inside them.
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To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.
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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.
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In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.
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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.
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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.
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I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
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For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.
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Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.
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I have never been in a violent movie or television show.
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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.
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A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.
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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.
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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.
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I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.
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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.
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When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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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.