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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

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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
Meet
Use
Place
Persons
Ideas
Typical
Explore
Person
Uses
People
Theater

More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.
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Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.
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Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
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Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.
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Art simply can’t be stopped.
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Confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.
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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.
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I mean, I think a healthy country is a country where people are healthy physically, and a smart country is a country where people are educated.
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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.
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Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.
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A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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I am not myself I am the potential of myself.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
Anna Deavere Smith