Anna Deavere Smith Quotes - Page 3

When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

I think what I am is a "convener"; I like to convene people around ideas.

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

If I do three interviews in a day, I can be exhausted, because the process of hearing everyone requires that I empty out myself. While I'm listening, my own judgments and prejudices certainly come up. But I know I won't get anything unless I get those things out of the way.

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

I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

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

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.

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.

Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.

Confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.

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 have never been in a violent movie or television show.

I have a lot of optimism about new doctors because I think it's really clear that it's a lot of hard work and no guarantee of a lot of money.

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

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

If you say a word often enough it becomes you.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

People realize that we're very good at sending people to war, but we're not good at taking care of them. And people are coming back from war now; years ago, they would have been killed, now they're wounded; and they're coming back alive and with post-traumatic stress. So, I think Americans are sensible enough to know we've got to figure out a way to take care of them.

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.

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

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

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators "the haute couture of language."