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You can't teach talent. You can't teach inspiration. You can teach people critical facilities. You can give them techniques. You can teach discipline. And you can teach them about the business.
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
People
Discipline
Teaching
Talent
Inspiration
Facilities
Teach
Facility
Business
Techniques
Give
Technique
Giving
Critical
More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
Anna Deavere Smith
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
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
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
I have never been in a violent movie or television show.
Anna Deavere Smith
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.
Anna Deavere Smith
I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to.
Anna Deavere Smith
Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.
Anna Deavere Smith
I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
Anna Deavere Smith
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
I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
Anna Deavere Smith
Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
Anna Deavere Smith
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
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
If you say a word often enough it becomes you.
Anna Deavere Smith
I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives.
Anna Deavere Smith
Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.
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
I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.
Anna Deavere Smith
Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on.
Anna Deavere Smith