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Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance.

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
Name
Names
Keep
Margins
Trying
Outsiders
Always
Frequently
Center
Distance
Tradition

More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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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.
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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 don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
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I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.
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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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Identity is an assemblage of constellations.
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That artists are called to be more responsible and 'true' is a tip of hat to their power.
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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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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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I am not myself I am the potential of myself.
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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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My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.
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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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My job in my work is not to acquire power it's to question power.
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Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.
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I think what I am is a convener I like to convene people around ideas.
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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.
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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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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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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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