Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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 turn into a crying, hysterical maniac when I see a spider. It's pathetic.
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It can be frightening to turn your back on what others think is right. But I'm not the same as a lot of people - I'm quite artistic and quite eccentric sometimes. If you honour that, you fit into yourself better - and people accept you for what you are.
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I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women.
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I am not an American; I am the American.
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The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
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Faith and prayer are the vitamins of the soul; man cannot live in health without them.
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In China, we don't know about the swimming pool game, but we know about Marco Polo.
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The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.
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You need to make a trip to Des Moines in August, because the Iowa State Fair really is a sight to see. The Iowa Fairgrounds are usually packed for those 11 days, and you get a real sense of what a classic Midwest fair is all about.
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All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change.
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I started making music with my band in the '80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.
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I started writing 'The Lord of Opium' in 2008 and produced about 80 pages before disaster struck. Three eye operations nearly put an end to my career.
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You live these three months in this reality, in this dark reality. You don't want to do those films every year because they're taxing. I started smoking a lot of cigarettes.
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If I'm saying a universal truth, but maybe it's something that people don't feel comfortable saying... It's a strange take, but at the same time, what you're hitting on is kind of right. You can relate. That's the heart of comedy. You have to have a point of view. You gotta commit. And the more you commit to it, sometimes the funnier it gets.
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People who are over-educated become risk-averse.
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Sympathetic cracks. A term frequently used by architects and surveyors in terms of ageing houses. I know what they mean.
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If there's one thing that 2009 showed us, it's that everything is happening everywhere, across multiple platforms, each one making waves that end up crashing against each other and commingling into one giant media sea.
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Sometimes I feel I hope I am not taking advantage of my stardom.
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I love it when ugliness is beautiful. I love character flaws.
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Yes, I guess I am bi-coastal.
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I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.
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I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.
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It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.
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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.
