Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

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Anna Deavere Smith

Profession : Actress

Birth : September 18, 1950

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

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.

Anna Deavere Smith

Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.

Anna Deavere Smith

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.

Anna Deavere Smith

If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.

Anna Deavere Smith

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.

Anna Deavere Smith

I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.

Anna Deavere Smith

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.

Anna Deavere Smith