Anna Deavere Smith

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”

“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 call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'”

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

“You know, interesting minds usually do hold more than one idea at a time.”

“Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.”

“Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.”

“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.”

“Each person has a literature inside them.”

“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.”

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

“Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.”