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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.

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
Understand
Doe
Every
Explorer
Something
Explorers
Time
Exploration
Studio
Studios
Exist

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Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
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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.
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If you say a word often enough it becomes you.
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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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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.
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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?
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I'm interested when things are upside down - because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators the haute couture of language.
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Confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.
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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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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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Self-esteem does not come from surrounding yourself with people and things that seem to increase your value. Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner-value with things in the world around you.
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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 see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.
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If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to.
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I think what I am is a convener I like to convene people around ideas.
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