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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Anna Deavere Smith
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 18
Academic
Actor
Actress
Film Actor
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
University Teacher
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Anna Smith
Anna Devere Smith
Anna Deveare Smith
Wildly
Underrated
Medication
Friendship
More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
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
Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
Anna Deavere Smith
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
Anna Deavere Smith
Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.
Anna Deavere Smith
I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to.
Anna Deavere Smith
I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
Anna Deavere Smith
If you say a word often enough it becomes you.
Anna Deavere Smith
I happen to be a hopeaholic. I tend to look at problems as an opportunity to do some work.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
I think what I am is a convener I like to convene people around ideas.
Anna Deavere Smith
When I was a kid, my grandfather said that if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.
Anna Deavere Smith
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
Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?
Anna Deavere Smith
I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.
Anna Deavere Smith
