Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
-
When I was a kid, all I ever wanted was to be famous.
-
Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.
-
Boating on the lake is one of my favorite summer activities.
-
Somebody once told me I shouldn't try to change Hollywood. That isn't my point at all. I don't want Hollywood to change me.
-
The lack of a consistent policy from major economies is the main source of volatility.
-
Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.
-
I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.
-
My journey has been that of a character actor.
-
I'm not always angry. In fact, I think I usually go out of my way to try to find roles that don't seem to be like me.
-
Too often in our communities many families have not even been aware that certain charities exist; and at the same time, there are many who are willing to volunteer their energy and their resources to help these charities, yet they do not know these charities even exist.
-
I left home at 17 and I've been on the road ever since.
-
It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.
-
People don't slip. Time catches up with them.
-
War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
-
There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.
-
I feel like I work on scripts for comedy as well as dramatic stuff the same.
-
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
-
The Matrix is top secret. There isn't much that can be said right now.
-
I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have done so much for women in comedy in the sense that they've normalized it. You don't think, 'I'm going to watch that comedy starring a woman,' you think, 'I'm going to watch that funny show.' They refuse to play the foils for men, or be reduced to the butt of every joke, and I love that about both of them.
-
Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.
-
Our culture loves movies and TV, which is wonderful, but there's something a little bit passive sometimes about watching, because you're looking at other people's imagination at work.
-
The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.
-
Wealthy men, too, like several of those in our neighborhood, had so many slaves that they were compelled to buy other plantations on which to employ them.
-
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.
