Anna Deavere Smith · 240 pages
Rating: (505 votes)
“We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“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, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Men didn't respect beauty...they used it.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Montana Sky
“People are complicated," she continued, "and the ones who aren't are boring."
"Then maybe I'm boring."
We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, "Maybe you are.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from American Wife
“Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.”
― Paul Auster, quote from Man in the Dark
“shall sail the iron ship with warriors of bone, You shall find what you seek and make it your own, But despair for your life entombed within stone, And fail without friends, to fly home alone.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from Demigods and Monsters: Your Favorite Authors on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series
“I blinked and wiped my hand over my face. My fingers came back damp. I glanced across the room and saw my reflection in the mirror, hair snarled, mascara running, face streaked with tears.
"Yep, you look like shit," Adam said. "And I took plenty of pictures, which I will keep until an appropriate opportunity for blackmail arises.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from Waking the Witch
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