Anna Deavere Smith People Quotations

I am interested in personal stories because that's when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're 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.

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

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

People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.

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.

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.

Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

You know, all kinds of people inspire me.

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 see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.

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.

In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers-people who do not know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.