Top 45 Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

I remember from my father’s funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.

Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don’t want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.

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.

I love studying how people are. Not just what they’re saying, but how they are, what they’re doing.

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

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.

For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.

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

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn’t have the resources to do that.

I think it’s really important to give yourself a very big question that you’re working on that you can come home to, even if you, you know, are going to have to go without a cup of coffee or even a meal, that that should nourish you.

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

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You’re going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I’d say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

Each person has a literature inside them.

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.

When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses – it was right after ‘Roots,’ and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.

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

Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.

Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.

I write plays about big, intense subjects.

My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth.

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

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

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.

I am interested in personal stories because that’s when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.

I mean, I think that – as an actress, in particular, I’m basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.

People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can’t be attacked.

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it’s so emotionally loaded. We don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators ‘the haute couture of language.’

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.

We owe the government taxes. We owe our creditors interest. What do these powers owe us?

When you think about it, words can break your heart, or they can change your day.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.

That artists are called to be more responsible and ‘true’ is a tip of hat to their power.

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

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

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

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after – there’s a strong respect for that in African culture.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

I have never been in a violent movie or television show.

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.

You know, all kinds of people inspire me.

My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.