Quotes from 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.

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.

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.

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.

I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to, even if you, you know, are going to have to go without a cup of coffee or even a meal, that that should nourish you.

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.

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.

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.

Each person has a literature inside them.

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.

I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It's the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it's a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They're digging deep and projecting out at the same time.

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.

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. Use your time to bathe yourself in that gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession… 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.

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.

You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.

Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.

Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.

My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.

Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial.

He was trying to get me to come inside and away from the scene, but I said, "No." I said, "We have to stay here and watch because this is wrong.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.

To get a headline, to get on the evening news, you have to attack a Jew. Otherwise you're ignored. And it's a shame. And we all play into it.

We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them.