143 Quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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.

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.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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