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

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
Like
Segregated
Grown
Environment
Path
Freedom
Feel
Feels
Work

More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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Hope is when you look out the window and you go, 'It doesn't look good at all, but I'm going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.'
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I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker I just didn't have the resources to do that.
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I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
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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.
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.
Anna Deavere Smith
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I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
Anna Deavere Smith
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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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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I have never been in a violent movie or television show.
Anna Deavere Smith
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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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.
Anna Deavere Smith
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators the haute couture of language.
Anna Deavere Smith
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That artists are called to be more responsible and 'true' is a tip of hat to their power.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Do you want to be an artist so that the whole world will look at you, or do you want to be an artist because you would like to use your ability to attract attention, to have the world see itself through you differently?
Anna Deavere Smith
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I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
Anna Deavere Smith
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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
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You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
Anna Deavere Smith