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I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
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
Foremost
Student
Students
Expression
Firsts
First
More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith
Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.
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
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
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.'
Anna Deavere Smith
I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators the haute couture of language.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker I just didn't have the resources to do that.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
Each person has a literature inside them.
Anna Deavere Smith
I have a lot of optimism about new doctors because I think it's really clear that it's a lot of hard work and no guarantee of a lot of money.
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
In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.
Anna Deavere Smith
Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.
Anna Deavere Smith
You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.
Anna Deavere Smith