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.”
“You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.”
“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.”
“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
“But you decided I was going to fail before I even had the chance to try.”
“Morirse no es difícil, solo da miedo.”
“There is no contradiction here. People live and suffer and endure in the real world of existing society, and any decent person should favor employing what means are available to safeguard and benefit them, even if a long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives. In”
“I never wanted to safe... I wanted to be good.”
“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
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