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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Each person has a literature inside them.
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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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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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You know, interesting minds usually do hold more than one idea at a time.
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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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Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.
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A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.
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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.
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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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For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.
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I have never been in a violent movie or television show.
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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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If I do three interviews in a day, I can be exhausted, because the process of hearing everyone requires that I empty out myself. While I'm listening, my own judgments and prejudices certainly come up. But I know I won't get anything unless I get those things out of the way.
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I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.
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We owe the government taxes. We owe our creditors interest. What do these powers owe us?
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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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Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.