Anna Deavere Smith

Actress

1950-09-18

Anna Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, and professor known for documentary-style solo theater works.

Quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.
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Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.
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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.
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I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.
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