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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
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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
Talk
Seems
Many
Loaded
Every
Inadequate
People
Vocabulary
Emotionally
Afraid
Race
More quotes by 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.'
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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.
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I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
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I am not myself I am the potential of myself.
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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.
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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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I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
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Each person has a literature inside them.
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Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.
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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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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.
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.
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I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.
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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
Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities.
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.
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators the haute couture of language.
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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
