Top 80 Anna Deavere Smith Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

2. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

3. “If you say a word often enough it becomes you.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

5. “Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

6. “Do you want to be an artist so that the whole world will look at you, or do you want to be an artist because you would like to use your ability to attract attention, to have the world see itself through you differently?”

— Anna Deavere Smith

7. “Self-esteem does not come from surrounding yourself with people and things that seem to increase your value. Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner-value with things in the world around you.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

8. “Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

9. “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

10. “Identity is an assemblage of constellations.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

11. “Each person has a literature inside them.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

12. “I think what I am is a “convener”; I like to convene people around ideas.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

13. “What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

15. “Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

16. “Discipline – both mental and physical – is crucial.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

17. “Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

18. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

19. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

20. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

21. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

22. “You can’t teach talent. You can’t teach inspiration. You can teach people critical facilities. You can give them techniques. You can teach discipline. And you can teach them about the business.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

23. “Hope is when you look out the window and you go, ‘It doesn’t look good at all, but I’m going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.’”

— Anna Deavere Smith

24. “My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

27. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

28. “I am lucky: I have fantastic doctors and a fantastic dentist.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

29. “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 that’s what we need most in our country today.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

30. “You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, its hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

31. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

32. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

33. “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

34. “Confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

35. “Art simply can’t be stopped.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

36. “I love studying how people are. Not just what they’re saying, but how they are, what they’re doing.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

37. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

38. “Suddenly in high school, I’m in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

39. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

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

— Anna Deavere Smith

41. “You know, interesting minds usually do hold more than one idea at a time.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

42. “I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators ‘the haute couture of language.’”

— Anna Deavere Smith

43. “You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

44. “For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

45. “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.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

46. “I don’t talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

47. “I remember from my father’s funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

48. “Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

49. “I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

50. “Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.”

— Anna Deavere Smith