Quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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. Its the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, its a moment when they want to communicate very badly. Theyre digging deep and projecting out at the same time.

The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of the individuals. 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. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition.

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

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.

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

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-thats what I love most. Thats where character lives.

President Obama called for a we nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And thats what we need most in our country today.

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.

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

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I dont know the statistics, but theres a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly theyre put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.

I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.

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. Thats not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and weve all been heavily sedated from it. If we dont come into consciousness of this tragedy, theres going to be a violent awakening we dont want. The question is, can we wake up?