Quotes from Anna Deavere Smith

Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.

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.

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.

I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing.

For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.

Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.

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.

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.

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.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

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.

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.

I am interested in personal stories because that's when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

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.

I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.

My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth.

I happen to be a hopeaholic. I tend to look at problems as an opportunity to do some work.

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 a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.

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.

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.

What my work is, is my approach to it. It's the practice. And my work is about the effort that I make to get there. And I think if there's anything artistic, it's in that middle space.