Quotes from Anna Deavere Smith


Sorted by Popularity


I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.


I write plays about big, intense subjects.


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, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.


Each person has a literature inside them.


Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.


If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.


You know, all kinds of people inspire me.


In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.


There's not a lot of flash about me.


Identity is an assemblage of constellations.


Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.


Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.


You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.


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.


In my own life I'm frequently in predominantly white atmospheres.


The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.


Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.


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.


Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.


I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.