James Shaw

“Each person has a literature inside them.”
― 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

“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