Anna Deavere Smith > Quotes

“Each person has a literature inside them.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It's the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it's a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They're digging deep and projecting out at the same time.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

“Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on. Use your time to bathe yourself in that gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession…

What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of the individuals. Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition.”
― Anna Deveare Smith

“You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“He was trying to get me to come inside
and away from the scene,
but I said, "No."
I said, "We have to stay here
and watch
because this is wrong.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

“We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

“I said, “Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair,” I said, “and we need a job program with stipends …” I said, “These young people really, ya know, are not in anybody’s statistics or data. They’ve been dropped off of everybody’s agenda. They live from grandmama to mama to girlfriend.” I said, “We now got young people who are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years old who have never worked a day of their lives.” I said, “These are the young people in our streets and they are angry and they are frustrated.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

“This moment is in the tradition of protest poetry and art that goes back centuries. I hope that this pain will lead to beautiful works of arts."-Anna Deavere Smith”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“To get a headline,
to get on the evening news,
you have to attack a Jew.
Otherwise you’re ignored.
And it’s a shame.
And we all play into it.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror

“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist